Woohoo! Sourdough!

I’ve been trying to successfully make a sourdough starter years, to be met with only disappointment.  I know I could have bought one, but I didn’t want to do that.  My older sister made sourdough all the time when I was a kid, and she made her own starter and kept it (like a pet) on the kitchen counter in a Boston baked bean pot.  Her sourdough breads were delicious, and I’ve been wanting to make them as well. When I asked her where she got the recipe, she said The Sunset Cook Book of Breads.

So I faithfully followed their fussy instructions: they have you start by heating a cup of milk to 90 or 100 degrees F and then remove it from the heat and stir in three tablespoons of plain yogurt and let the whole thing stand for eighteen to twenty-four hours.  As you might have guessed, this isn’t making sourdough starter so much as it’s making yogurt.  But into this yogurt you stir one cup of flour until smoothly blended and then cover tightly and let stand in a warm place until the mixture is full of bubbles and has a good sour smell.  Well, it never worked, and I’d have to throw out the ingredients in disgust and disappointment, again.

I don’t know if it’s because you make it with a yogurt or not, but I can tell you that part of the reason it failed is because they have you cover it tightly. No wonder it never worked!  Sourdough starters work by capturing wild yeasts from the air, much like Belgian beers do.  If you cover it, the wild yeasts can’t get in there, and you’re just spoiling a cup of yogurt and a cup of flour, which is what I’d been doing all along.

Last weekend I finally got wise and called my sister.  May as well go to the mountain, I figured.  In talking, she mentioned that she knew that Lane Publishing later changed the instructions for sourdough starter. She had the second edition whereas I had the third, so I asked her to read me the instructions from her book.  They were much, much simpler, and they worked.