It's alive!

This is bizarre, truly bizarre stuff. About 24 hours after kicking off the starter, a layer of yellowish liquid appeared on the surface of my starter, presumably some of the water and grape juice separating out. It got steadily deeper, and I considered stirring it in but thought better of it, deciding to follow the book (which doesn't say to do anything to it for two weeks).



This morning, the Kiwi pointed out (with some alarm) that things had changed somewhat. As you can see from the picture, the whitish goop has surged up from beneath the liquid and is full of bubbles, proving that something is active within the box. The photo doesn't really do justice to quite how mental this thing's gone, and we've still got a minimum of eight days left to go before I'm allowed to tinker with it. The recipe says ten days to two weeks, and I'm sticking to it. The one thing I'm allowing myself to do is to pop the lid every now and then to release any gas - I don't fancy scraping fermenting yeast and flour off my kitchen walls in the event of an explosion.

This is brilliant - a great sign that my starter is alive, for now at least. I'm very proud. More on this as we get it.