IT'S ALIVE!!!

As promised... here's the first installment of my tracking of the sourdough starter featuring the first and second day of this yeasty journey.

I contemplated detailing the process of how to make this starter, but that's not the goal of these posts. Mostly, I guess, this is for me to track the process of this fickle creature so, if something goes awry, I can return to these posts and check where I went wrong... or, if all goes well, then this will serve as a shining beacon of a job well done. :) For now, I will just say that this recipe comes from 'The King Arthur Flour Baking Companion'. The basic idea of a sourdough starter, according to my minimal understanding, is to halve and feed, and halve and feed, and halve and feed, etc. over the course of 5 days to a week to develop the natural yeasty product already existing within the flour. This is a daunting process for me on account of it's a long and involved one. It's only day two, and I am already feeling pretty attached to this little baby. Maybe because of the awesome transformation that I have already witnessed... wait... I'm getting ahead of myself there. Basically... I'm very fearful that my starter wont work out, and I will have wasted all that flour, time, and nurturing on a failure. As it's still early in the process, though, for now I will attempt to push that trepidation out of my mind and just focus on loving this smelly, yeasty being.

Day 1

This will hopefully be the most boring picture of the bunch (if all goes according to plan) on account of here, we simply have the mixture of water, rye flour, and a bit of molasses, pre any sort of fermentation. Looks normal, right... like if you add a few more cups of flour, a little yeast, and knead... you'll get a regular loaf of bread. No. That's not what we want... so we place it in the oven with the pilot light on (as per Sir Arthur, King of Flour's suggestion... supposedly this creates an environment that is about 80 degrees Fahrenheit... admittedly, leaving the pilot light on in the oven kind of kills the environmentalist in me that goes around the apartment unplugging all appliances not in use and turning off lights to rooms nobody is in :/). There it remains for the next 24 hours for our microscopic buddies that live deep within the flour to awaken and start feeding. Nom nom nom.

Day 2

Woah, baby!! Look at that action. The concoction doubled over night, thinned out, and is fizzing with fermentation. In addition to the the visual cues of activity, the starter has developed a very pungent smell. I've been attempting to find the words to describe this intense smell ever since I unscrewed the jar this morning. Some of the intensity, I assume, comes from the fact that I used rye flour which gives off a slightly different scent than regular, all-pupose flour... but mostly, the smell is that of extremely potent yeast. Although, normally I enjoy the light aroma of yeast, this definitely has a more tangy, offensive odor to it (but also grows on you the more whiffs you take :P).

Okay... that's it for the first installment... 5 more days to go.

Oh right... the sound track for this post (and most of my day) has been WNYC's Radio Lab Podcast. CHECK THEM OUT. This show, springing from NPR, is such an interesting and creative listen. (One of the podcasts I listened to today involved a sort of love story between this couple essentially revolving around the exchange of a few of these podcasts. Anyways, that's not the point, the guy in the story described this podcast as an "investigation of what it's like to be a human being..." and then later went on to say that if you listen to these podcasts (specifically speaking of a certain three, "Who Am I", "Memory and Forgetting', and "Sleep", but I think it can be aptly applied to all their episodes) "you will find afterwards that your soul has been expanded, even if just a little bit." I thought those were extremely superb explanations of the show and how it makes me feel/think.) So go onto iTunes, or their website, and listen to some of their podcasts... it's FREE... how can you say no to free?? :)

(Towards the end of writing this, though, I switched over to some songs from the movie 'Clueless'... as I couldn't concentrate on both listening and typing. :P)