Notes on Sour Dough and Sour Dough Starter Culture

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Sour Dough Coffee Cake recipe here

I've recently gotten into making my own sour dough.  It's really pretty amazing stuff.  It's just unbleached flour with filtered water allowed to ferment for a few days before using it.  The flour and water "catches" the wild yeasts and such in the air and create the starter spontaneously.  Once ripened, the mixture will have a healthful blend of yeasts and bacteria that are essential for good gut health -- and it tastes good.  What's not to like about that?

I'm not going to post pictures and instructions because there are a lot of folks out there that have done quite admirable jobs at it.  My friend, James, gave me instructions, then I found a site that gave the same instructions with pictures.  This is the link to that site.  

I will say that a lot of sites offer to sell you sour dough starter, and while that may be all well and good; I wanted to make my own.  There's just something really satisfying about creating your own starter culture and then baking with it.

Here are some links that I've found to be useful in this process:

Helpful starter instructions with pictures here.  This is what I did.

Here's a recipe that looks easy for starting out with an Artisan type bread.

And another recipe.

Sour Dough Pancake Recipe here.  I made these and they turned out great!

Lots and lots of sour dough recipes!

From my friend Julie:  "I have tried this -- it makes HEAVENLY bread-- use it in
 any yeast bread recipe to make it exponentially better than with yeast packets! The BEST way to use up the "discarded" starter is to make sourdough egg noodles-- 1 c starter, 3 c whole grain flour, and 2 eggs-- mix, roll, cut, boil. easy as pie-- well, way easier than pie."


Once we've baked with it, at some point it will need to be stored.  I've read several differing opinions about storing the starter.  What I read here seems the most reasonable.  She says to NOT cover the sour dough starter tightly because the expanding gases during the fermentation process can cause the container to explode.  Explosion = bad.