Sourdough Breadmaking Goodtimes – Starting the Starter

I love sourdough bread, having been spoilt by bakeries such as Sonoma and Bourke St Bakery when we were living in Sydney. Recently I’ve been making some basic bread recipes, eg Jamie Oliver’s one, and the NY Times featured no knead bread recipe. My mother-in-law put two and two together and bought me a great new book for my birthday – Wild Sourdough by Yoke Mardewi.

This book is great. It tells you how to get your starter going from scratch – with just organic wholemeal rye and water. It has lots of info about the different grains, and I learnt lots of stuff eg spelt is really just a particular kind of wheat (triticum) and actually has more gluten in it than regular wheat flour.

The theory goes that the flour contains enough wild yeast under the bran in the grain to get the culture going, and also lactobaccilis bacteria that make the starter quite acidic with a ph of 3 or 4. After a week or more of developing the starter it arrives at a point where the yeast and lactobacillus are in symbiotic harmony. The acidity meaning that nothing else is likely to grow.

I only had some wholemeal wheat flour on hand when I started, and was impatient, so used this to get started. The ratio of flour to water was 1:1.125 (100g flour, 112g water). I initially used freshly collected rainwater (it was raining outside) for fear of chlorine and flouride in the water killing the wild yeasts. Since then I’ve used water out of our pura-tap water filter, and it’s all good.

Yoke recommends 25 to 28 degrees as perfect for getting starter culture started. It is the beginning of winter in Adelaide so our house is cooler than that, we heat it to about 22 degrees. I was worried it wouldn’t be warm enough but it was fine.

After two days the dough was all bubbly and so on, but had some brown stuff on the surface and some greyish watery liquid. I took the top layer off and fed it some more and kept going.

After another two days it was looking better, though it was going kind of purple on the top, which I was a bit alarmed by, but it is fine – seems to be the bran changing colour on the surface as it oxidises (or that’s my guess anyway). Again i took the top off and fed it some more, this time with organic rye wholemeal.

From then I kept feeding it every day or two and after about 10 days it was doing all the right things – doubling in size after 6 to 8 hours and looking very mouse-like.

I then made my first loaf with this starter, the ‘pain au levian’ from Wild Sourdough … it was awesome.