Have you ever taken the time to look up a recipe on how to make sourdough starter only to find dozens of versions? Some include fruit or active dry yeast, others use sugar and then there is the soupy starter and the thick dough starter. There are those who think you must leave the starter uncovered so it can "catch" the natural yeast in the air, others say it doesn't matter. Ugh, how overwhelming! That's how I felt as I started researching sourdough starters about 6 months ago. However, I was determined to figure out how to make my own sourdough starter and create some beautiful sourdough breads.
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| Fresh baked sourdough bread. |
A disclosure: I am not an expert on sourdough. The information I am providing you is what I have found as I've been doing my research. Before including the information below, I went to the most reliable sources I could find. If I found a strain of thought on someone's blog, I made sure I could find support for it before including it. I do not have a list of reference for this, mostly because I went on hundreds of sites through the course of time and found it far too difficult to keep track of all the places I visited. Think of this information as if coming from a friend, sitting down at the kitchen table and visiting while eating a slice of fresh baked sourdough bread! :-) I have also done quite a bit of my own experimenting with starter, just to see what worked and what didn't. This is not to say that my method is the only one, it's simply what I found to work best and was the most consistent for me.
A Little Background
Before the advent of cultivated yeasts like active dry yeast, cooks had to "capture" their own yeast through a sourdough starter. It's been said that sourdough bread has been made and eaten since the time of the Egyptians, 6000 years ago. There is belief that the first sourdough starter came to the US in the hold of Columbus' ship. By the 19th century, pioneers and miners were carrying a sourdough starter with them in their travels, allowing them to more easily make bread without stopping to find and purchase yeast. Sourdough gained in popularity during the California Gold Rush and it was during this time that the famous San Francisco sourdough was started.
