Ferment-nation

This is me, defiantly striding away from the world of store bought, cookie cutter, everyone is the same yeast. That's right folks, I am making sourdough bread today.

Sourdough bread is cool because you only need three things to make it, flour, salt, water, and time. A week ago I mixed a cup of flour with a cup of water, put it in a big sterilized jar and left it on my windowsill overnight. Every day after that I removed a quarter cup of the mixture from the jar, and added a quarter cup of flour and a quarter cup of water. The rest was up to Science and her Many Creatures.

What I was doing was creating a lovely habitat for wild yeasts such as Candida Milleri, and Saccharomyces exiguus, and for lactobacteria like Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis, L. pontis, L. fermentum, L. fructivorans, L. brevis, and L. paralimentarius. These Many Creatures could be present in my sourdough starter, but not necessarily all of them. The Important Part is that you have a successful balance of lactobacteria and yeast. The wild yeast leavens the bread, and the lactobacteria feed on yeast by products and make it a cool place for yeast to live. This is why I fed the starter every day, to provide enough of the right kind of food so that my yeast and lactobacteria could grow big and strong and beat up any undesirable microorganisms that tried to step up.

Now all I have to do is wait, and see if my little culture has it in 'em to stand up to the flour and salt I mixed in earlier. Come on Bender, show that sack of flour what for! TURN THAT MOTHERFUCKER INTO BREAD.