What is Sourdough Starter

So I have been waxing poetically about sourdough and sourdough starter for a bit now but its important that you understand exactly what sourdough starter is and how it survives. First a little bit of history. 

Bread is essential for life. No seriously. Bread has been documented in someway shape or form since the beginning of recorded history and quite possibly even earlier than that. Humans have been cooking bricks of mashed up water and grains quite literally forever. Even bread as we know it can be dated back to the ancient Egyptians. The Jewish slaves didn’t stick around to wait for the bread to rise. This means they were leavening their bread. Even back then they knew that bread tasted better after a few hours of rising because it makes the bread airy. But what did they use to make the bread rise? They were using a sourdough starter, or at least something very much like it. Like beer and wine however there wasn’t very much science behind it, but because of tradition they knew what they had to do to make great bread. 

Natural yeast combined with bacteria creates a process known as fermentation. Natural yeast can be found in and on almost anything. It’s also floating through the air right now. You just have to capture it. Yeast is most prevalent on grapes and plants, particularly hops and berries. So it should come as no surprise that those are the predominant ingredients in wine and beer. To make beer and wine back then, they would “pitch” previous days wine or beer into the new batch. Whether they knew exactly what they were doing or not, the fact remains that they were cultivating wild yeast with every iteration of beer and wine making it stronger and tastier. The same process was done with bread. A baker would make dough, reserve a portion of the dough and place that reserve in the dough the next day. This continued and this reserve eventually began to take on a pungent smell, hence the name sourdough, but the breads would taste better and better, as well as rise better. So again, the bakers of old might not have known exactly what was happening but they knew it worked and just like beer, wine, cheese, kimchi, pickling, or anything else that uses the process of fermentation, it is a process that attributed to the survival of the human race. So yes, bread is essential for life.

So let’s finally get down to it. Sourdough starter is a substrate for wild yeast. The mixture itself is as simple as it could be. Equal parts water and flour. You mix the water and flour together, and within a week you will have a starter strong enough to bake bread with. What happens within this week is wild yeast in the air as well as in the flour its self will gather and activate in this mixture and will grow. The yeast will eat the mixture that you created and create carbon dioxide. This will create gas and you starter will begin to grow. As long as you keep your starter fed with fresh water and flour it will last forever.