Along with toilet paper shortages, yeast shortages, and sew your own mask patterns galore, we now have a pandemic sourdough cult sweeping across the country. Both of my daughters have successfully made their own sourdough starter and baked beautiful sourdough loaves of bread in the past week. The photo Katee (my oldest daughter) sent me (above) of the remaining half of a loaf she had baked had me salivating. I couldn’t help myself. I was infected with…
Sourdough Madness
So I asked my daughters for advice (even though I vaguely remember doing this whole sourdough thing when I was about their age). Kristi (my youngest daughter) was going to give me some of her starter instead of my needing to start my own. But I decided to try starting my own using a sourdough starter recipe from King Arthur flour. “How hard can it be?” I asked myself (famous last words). If they can do it surely I can too.
Each feeding took 1 cup of flour and a half cup of water. Big mistake asking a flour company how to make sourdough starter since their whole purpose in life is to—wait for it—sell more flour! I later learned Kristi maintained her starter with only 20g of flour for each feeding (about 1/2 cup).
My sourdough madness infection lasted 4 1/2 days. Kristi told me to save the sourdough discard to make crumpets or pancakes when I had collected enough of it. I began saving discard on Day 3 of my madness. (Yes, every time you feed your starter, you have to discard half of it or you’ll end up with a Mount Vesuvius of sourdough starter) So I began to save the discard. This morning (beginning of day 5) I made pancakes with the discard. Besides eating pancakes for breakfast today I have two more days worth of pancakes in the refrigerator.
A plethora of sourdough madness
Meanwhile I’m now supposed to be feeding (and discarding half) of my sourdough starter every twelve hours. Do the math folks. How many pancakes will I have made from discards by the time I make my first loaf of bread in anywhere from 3 to 10 days? I don’t know about you, but if I eat pancakes every day my hips are going to grow even bigger than they already are. This is not a good thing for me or the world.
The wide-mouthed quart jar that Blanche (yes I named my sourdough starter Blanche) lives in may never come clean. (It sounds so much better to say, “I have to feed Blanche now,” instead of saying, “It’s time to feed my sourdough starter.”) Do you remember making glue with a mixture of flour and water when you were kids? Well, that’s what sourdough starter is made from along with any stray yeast particles that linger in the air in your home. Crusty, stinky, bubbly, messy glue. That’s what I had a lot of, in a big quart jar, with layers and layers of drying gunk on the sides.
After my breakfast (of pancakes) today I came to my senses. I haven’t got the patience (or the hips) for this!
So today I bid Blanche
A fond farewell
Sic Transit Blanche
She now resides in our compost bin and will join with all of the other compost-able stuff to make compost instead of bread.
Deep heavy sigh. That was interesting.
Now back to my photography and painting which require much less patience and fiddling (and are much less fattening).
How about you? Have you succumbed to the pandemic sourdough madness?
May you walk in beauty.
Note: I have taken no photos of Blanche because, well, she just wasn’t that photogenic. Instead, I’m sharing a few recent photos from around and about my yard, French Regional Park, and a digital cyanotype experiment I did over the weekend.
Note for photographers: Here is my process for creating digital cyanotype images. Take a photo of something (backlit if possible). In Photoshop make second layer of the photo. Invert that layer by pressing Ctrl I. Flatten the layers. I used Nik Silver Efex plugin to convert the photo to B&W, chose to darken the exposure, increase structure, and then used the darkest cyanotype shade. After exiting Silver Efex, I added 2-3 layers of photo filters in Photoshop, 1 or 2 blue filter layers and 1 cyan filter layer at 50%.
Almost a haze of green, not quite. The greening is happening now my friends. Enjoy!
View from bedroom window through smoothed out curtain
French Regional Park
Under the pine trees, French Regional Park
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