Several years ago we made a sour dough starter and made some amazing bread. With the memories of that delicious homemade bread, we decided to make a new sour dough starter. So yesterday we gathered our supplies and began the multi-day process. It takes about 5 days total to have it fully develop to make the bread.
Yesterday we took a large mason jar and weighed out flour and water. It calls for 4 oz of water and 4 oz of flour. I weighed out the mason jar (basically making the scale read zero after the jar was placed on it) and poured in the 4oz of flour. Once I got the flour in, I added the water. I ran into a small dilemma, when adding the water. The scale I was using maxed out on weight which caused the starter to be slightly wetter than I recall our last starter being. We fixed it, then covered it up with plastic wrap and put it on the counter.
Today I “fed” the starter, which my kids could not wrap their heads. Megan helped me today. The way I described it to her was that the yeast needed food to grow. The yeast in the flour were sleeping and as you feed them they wake up and eat. As they eat, they release gas, kind of like a fart. You will see bubbles in the dough as the yeast “fart.” We were lucky to see some of these bubbles already starting.
We added 4 oz of flour, which we had to measure outside of the mason jar. I decided to cut back some of the water and only added 2 oz since it was still a bit too wet. We will update this post as we progress through the starter. Hopefully by next weekend we will be able to make some delicious sour dough bread.