I’m on a bit of forced austerity these days, so there won’t be any new shoes or bags in my near future. To entertain myself while I raise more funding to pay off my debts, in a way that doesn’t involve spending outrageous amounts of money on overpriced alcohol and food in the middle east, I’ve committed to cooking and baking at home. And since flour and water are relatively cheap, and since I hate store bought bread, and since I have an abundance of Turkish yeast from previous bread making attempts (the challah came out great, but I had to use 2-3x more)… I took the plunge into my first batch of sourdough starter. Hard to believe I grew up with a Mormon mother who went through the mandatory sourdough phase, but never got around to figuring out how to do it myself. Turns out it’s quite easy, but everyone and their pet has a different way of doing it. Mine is based on the allrecipes.com method as relayed to me by memory from a friend – which is sort of cheating since it uses yeast, but a) I have tons, as I said, and b) whole grain flours are somewhat unheard of here, and c) while the pineapple juice method was intriguing, I don’t trust any of the juices here to be much more than sugar and food coloring.
SO: 1/2 cup all purpose flour, 1/2 water, 1 T yeast. After 12 hours I had this super bubbly concoction, which had doubled in size:
Ok, so it turns out the recipe is actually 2 cups flour, 2 cups water, 1 packet (~4 tsp) of yeast. My proportions /may/ be a little off… but you know, the yeast here doesn’t perform super well, so using extra was probably the right move.