Our online book club read the book Sourdough
by Robin Sloan this month and we discussed it a little over a week ago. Since it was my book choice, I thought it would be fun for us all to try our hand at making our own sourdough, so I sent everyone some starter. Everyone got it within a few days of each other this weekend, and our chat discussions began. Everyone was comparing how their starter was doing. Some have multiplied way faster than others. Since we are all novices at this, it will be fun to compare notes on how things are going.
I purchased live starters for everyone
and to say it was sticky, was an understatement.
We had to scrape it out of the package into a bowl and added unbleached flour and water.
The instructions said not to use tap water-unchlorinated distilled water was recommended. I used tap water the last time a friend gave me some starter, so I used tap water and I don’t see any issues so far—a few others did use distilled water. I mixed it and covered it and within a few hours I could see bubbles forming on the surface.
I fed it again about 8 hours later with more flour and water, mixing it in. The directions say equal parts by weight not volume, but I think mine might may be a bit too watery- I am going to add more flour tonight before bed. In spite of the consistency, it is growing in leaps and bounds—but not singing to me yet (you have to read the book to know about singing—both to the starter and from the starter!)
I moved mine into a larger container and fed it again today. By this afternoon I had ample starter to use in a recipe.
I made sour dough rolls using the bread machine to do the heavy lifting. I use the bread machine almost every week to make rolls, and the container is maybe 2/3 full by the end of the dough cycle. With sourdough, it was almost overflowing—
with slightly less flour than I normally use in my rolls. They rose well and cooked over twice as long as my normal flour/yeast rolls.
Great texture and outer crust.
We all liked them.
Some are doing loaves of bread; others are going to try pizza crust or cinnamon rolls. This is taking book club to a whole new level! Great fun!