My First Dough-Baby or Working With Sourdough Starter

I have a baby - a dough-baby.  I nurture and coddle my dough-baby, lovingly and carefully feeding her twice daily in the hopes that when she grows up she will give me a nice, round, crusty loaf of bread.

My sourdough starter in action.  It needs to double in size after you feed it with flour and water.  About an hour ago it  up to the level of the red line. So yes, it is alive and well.  Dough-baby's doing good!

It all started with a recent trip to Disney's California Adventure.  They have this bakery there called the Boudin Bakery.  You can go on a tour of the bakery where you learn all about the sourdough process.  You even get to sample a bite of the most amazingly flavored velvety textured sourdough bread.  It's hardly fair. That little sample is almost like a tease.  So of course you can  (and should) also buy a loaf while you're there - which fortunately for us lasted the trip home - but unfortunately for us not much longer. I bought a random loaf in the grocery store to fill the void but found it seriously lacking.  I found out that some grocery store sourdough isn't even "real" but flavor enhanced (i.e. NOT really real) sourdough. I decided that if I wanted the authentic sourdough taste I would have to make my own.  Thus started my newest obsession...

I learned that it's not as easy as simply saying "I want to make sourdough bread."  Sourdough is a practice and an ancient art.  Sourdough is a natural leavening you can't just go BUY  in a store like yeast or baking powder but have to grow and nurture.  I found some great resources to help me like sourdoughhome.com and breadtopia.com.  You can either start from scratch and make your own starter (not recommended for beginners) or start with someone else's -  keeping and caring for it till it is grown and matured and ready to use.  You can do a quick web search and find a massive amount of sources for sourdough starter.  I chose to go with one I found on Amazon that is sold by Breadtopia.com.

Dried Sourdough Starter.  Just feed with flour and spring water and watch it come to life and grow! More exciting than Sea Monkeys!

It's been about a week of careful feeding and nurturing and telling her she is the most beautiful and lively dough-baby ever.  I think she is almost ready to go to the next level.  Perhaps by this Sunday we will have a lovely warm loaf of sourdough bread!  I'll keep you posted!