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Blogs by Alice E Lewis
Sour Dough Ali 1/28/2006 10:59:27 AM
I have been working on it for quite some time. Now it is finally perfected. Ever since I wrote By Hands of Strangers I have been thinking of ways to become less product dependent. One of the ways is to bake sour dough bread, the kind of bread like I remembered from my childhood, the kind like Nacia baked just before we had to flee Poland. See chapter one of my book. My father also used to bake it when we first came to the United States. Then easy store bought things crept into our lives. Now that both of my parents are gone and I had no one to ask how it was done, I had to experiment with the process till I got it right. It took me two weeks of trial and error till I created a yeast-free sourdough starter. Now I have an active culture sitting in my refrigerator waiting for my next baking day.
This is how I did it. Take one cup of rye flour and one cup water. Stir together and let it sit out in the open for a day. Throw half of it away, and add another cup of rye flour and another cup of water. Do this for as long as it takes till bubbles begin to froth up in your batter. Then refrigerate it for 24 hours before using it. To make a good sourdough starter it needs to ferment at room temperature, which grows the lactobicilli,and at refrigeration temperature, which produces the acidic acid. Both of those are needed to leaven a sourdough loaf of bread.
I will work on recording the amounts of other ingredients to share in my next entry.
