Yummy and good for you! Did you make your starter with or without yeast? I love sd bread too, but my starter is kaput and I need to start over again. What was your recipe for your starter?

Years ago, when we ate bread, I did sourdough. It made yummy bread. Fun to keep it up, too.
Kathy

I would like the recipe for starter.

Carla

The pizza dough turned out wonderful. David said it was the best yet. The texture was so smooth and elastic.

The starter for the sourdough I used is:

1 tsp dry yeast
1/4 cup warm water (105 to 115)
3/4 cup milk(I warmed it a little)
1 cup unbleached all purpose flour

This made the foamiest, most active starter I have ever had! The dough it made was just wonderful to handle, kind of stinky but not too stinky. And oh my did it rise high and punched down beautifully.

I will post the pizza dough recipe tomorrow. I had the best time working with this recipe.

Deb

Oh...I put the starter into a ceramic crock and left it on the cabinet to ferment for 3 days, stirring every day. The hooch(clear liquid on top) I just mixed back into the starter. I used only a wooden spoon. The only time the starter touches metal is when I put it into my mixer bowl to make up the dough. After it ferments, I keep it in the fridge and feed it once a week after I take a cup out. I put 1/2 cup water and 1/2 cup flour back into the remainder and set it out on the counter until for the day and it gets all nice and foamy. I then put it back into the fridge. It has become by "baby".....LOL

Carla - the above will certainly work well. But sourdough is generally considered dough made without a commercial yeast. If you plant roses, you don't get daffodils, right? So yeast is the same. If you use a commercial yeast, it will not turn into a different yeast, it will simply be that yeast. Not that this is good or bad, it's just the fact - you grow the yeast you start with. If you let it over rise, you can get it to taste sour, but that's not exactly the same.

So in making wine or making beer or making bread, you can use a commercial yeast or you can attempt to find a wild or a feral yeast. They are all over and they are how people always made bread and wine until recently, when science was able to identify and propagate certain strains.

The recipe for that is as follows:

Take some flour. Mix in enough water to make a batter about the consistency of pancake batter. Leave it on the counter until it starts to bubble. This may take up to five or six days.

Then take care of it.

End of story.

The yeasts that you get this way are all over - some work really fast, some slower, some have more flavor, some less. If you don't like what you get, you can try again. But they will certainly be different from anything you get using a commercial yeast. I have three in my fridge at the moment. Again, I'm not knocking commercial yeasts, but you end up with an entirely different product.

And the other thing to remember is that a good part of the flavor with sourdough comes from the bacteria that work with the yeast. These are also caught the same way - and one of the problems with commercial yeast is that they don't include the bacteria. So you can use a bit of yogurt - it's a fairly closely related bacteria and it will improve the flavor of your bread.

Good luck with this.

Rosesinny,

I have read about catching the natural yeast. So you put the flour and water together and then add some yogurt...perhaps a couple tablespoons or would you add more?

I also read a recipe yesterday that says; flour, water and pineapple juice. I suppose the juice would feed the starter.

I am going to start me a new starter using your way and see what kind of "hooch" I can get. LOL

Deb

I never caught my own. Mine came from a friend who got it from someone else and so on. I tended it faithfully for many months and then I got really busy and let it go. It was a delicious starter too. I didn't know they could be different flavors. Kind of wished I hadn't given it away now. Bread is so much fun and makes the house smell so good- puts everybody in a good mood when they walk in and smell it baking.

In August I got the sourdough starter bug, and made some with wheat flour and bread flour. THEN I went to Denver for a visit, and I started some there. Equal parts flour and water in a glass container covered with a wet cloth, fed every 12 hours or so. It was bubbly and wonderful, and I sneaked it back to California on the plane in my luggage in a zip lock bag!

If you wish to preserve some of your wonderful starter, simply brush it with a pastry brush onto a sheet of parchment. It will dry, and you can then flake it off and keep in a zip lock in the freezer for that emergency when you let the real thing die accidently. Easy to reconstitute with warm water and a little more flour.

desertdance, how do you "feed" the starter? Have you ever used yogurt with yours? I just don't grasp how flour and water can make the bread sourdough.
After you had water and flour in Denver, what did you add before you baked it. I think I shall buy a book on making bread, or google complete directions. I want some for cold days. I used to make simple bread by hand with no machine.

Carla

Carla, google sourdough bread. I have learned so much from just reading and trying to make the bread. I let my starter die of course! I almost cried but I had a family emergency and couldn't help it.
I am totally addicted to bread making. I so love the feel of dough in my hands. It is mesmerizing(sp)to me!
I have been planning on starting another starter but haven't got around to it.
DesertDance, that is hilarious to me....smuggling a starter across the sky borders...hahahahahaha!!!! Too cute!

Carla...how are you doing love?

Deb

DEb---you are making me hungry-----LOL

Florence

Carla - I can't believe this thread is resurrected, but the way you "feed" your starter is just with more flour and water.

The yeast is in the air. Or it is in the grain when it is milled. Or both. THere are many yeasts all around. So if you leave some flour and water in an open area, some yeast spores will eventually settle in and start eating the sugars in your mix. This is how they made wine for many years as well. Eventually they got to the point where they could isolate a particular strain of yeast, keep it alive, and sell it. With beer, bread, wine - the idea is for the yeast to eat the sugars and convert them to simpler alcohols. There is a BIG difference in the flavors produced from one yeast to another.

I make "bread" a couple of times a week. But it only takes a few minutes once you get the hang of it. I started about 30 years ago when I worked in a bakery and saw them sweep up the flour from the parking lot and put it into the sifters, or use the broken bags from the train cars that were sprayed with bug killers. It was a mob place, but I figured that I'd rather make my own bread. At the time, there were no bread machines, etc, so I just did everything by hand.

Now I usually use the dough for pizza or a kind of chapati that I make in the morning. Trying to get a perfect pizza dough in my home oven. At any rate, yeasts work differently. Sometimes I need to wait three days, sometimes it's closer to three hours. I suspect that for the latter, it's really not a wild yeast but a commercial yeast that's floating around.

Rosesinney.
Hi. Could you give me a run - down on your making a pizza with sd.
Sounds like youve been there done it..........and trashed the Tshirt.
Cheers
PS I aint much experienced but I am willing .
I live up a mountain in Taiwan and have just discovered kefir crystals for easy yoghurt ......could the kefir waters and of course the yog be used in place of bought yeast....OR do I need to always need to have an ancilliary starter ?
Sorry another thing....through intuition I bung into my dough some light chinese dried seaweed ( guessing enzymes will help along )....any comments. ?
Up untill now all results have been hard got `cos of baking on top of wok with only steam power... have now made a concrete oven so will want to proceed with a surefire recipe thats tried and tested.
As the chinese say " Im nankan " = having a hard time ....the women oft say to me " mianbao hai mei hao " = the bread still not good !