Starting the starter

Finding myself recently with quite a bit of spare time, I've begun a project I've been meaning to get into for a while. I'm going to bake my own sourdough bread, but rather than using brewer's yeast of the sort you can get fresh from a friendly baker or dried in packets, I'm making my own sourdough starter, using natural wild yeasts. This is a bit of an undertaking for me, so I'm going to document the process on this blog - it should take about four weeks until I can make some bread, and we're dealing with me trying to keep a bucket of micro-organisms alive for that time, so it could be interesting.

The way this is supposed to work, I think, is that we try to slowly culture yeasts, found both naturally in flour and on the skins of organic grapes, in a food-rich mixture of flour and water, until we get to the point where the starter is a more or less stable environment containing both active yeast colonies and a fair bit of acids and all sorts of good things. Once we're stable, we use a bit of the starter to bake some bread, and feed the starter to replace the lost volume and kick it off again. That's the rough theory, anyway.



So here's where we begin, with the stuff needed to make the starter. I decided that spending a small fortune on organic flour was probably out of the question at this point, so for this run I'm attempting this with normal high grade bread flour. The grapes are organic, all $11.00 of the blighters. I'm also using water that's been out of the tap for a while, to let some of the chlorine gas escape (our water here is somewhat aggressively treated). The water and flour variables are ones I'll change if this doesn't work.



Here's it all mixed together. The grapes are tied up in a light tea towel, so they can be lifted out later on. They're lightly crushed, with the juice mixed in with the flour and water, and then submerged in the goop. Lid on, wait two weeks for stuff to happen. I will report back.