I doubt any of you do, but anyone who follows me on various social media will know that my personal description often includes some reference to regularly killing off sourdough starters.
This was never intentional. I’ve had some success over the years – not a lot, but some. A. few brilliant loaves which were well worth the maintenance and the 24 hour production process, definitely. Some starters I even managed to keep going for a matter of weeks…
…But the problem is you’re meant to keep them going for ages. Months. Years. There are restaurants that still use starters ‘descended’ from the original decades after, like the human body, the actual physical cellular structure had regenerated time and time again, just in a different way. There are even sourdough starter hotels for the truly dedicated (just not truly dedicated enough to skip a couple of weeks on the Algarve, and who can blame them).
I reckon my average, and this is me being very generous, was about three weeks.
Yet, for anyone who has ever tried and achieved even the one loaf, we all know that it’s worth it. The bread is incomparable to anything you get from a shop, and if you can display enough willpower to let it cool enough so that you can nick the very edge while it’s just still warm enough to melt butter by itself, you know that taste, texture and chew and the rewarding feeling of a hell of a lot of hard work put in.
I can tell you from past experience that, for all it looks great in cookery books and on TV, the River Cottage style way of a quaint looking Kilner jar, securely fastened of lid and caked in residual starter, is a BIG mistake. I realised this when a huge bang in the kitchen heralded the realisation that my starter at the time (thankfully stored in a cupboard at the time but less fortunately, up to then the most productive I had ever made) had blown the side out of it’s house and was subsequently found oozing out of the cupboard all over the kitchen floor.
Yet, with that a distant memory of many years, here in a new house and rediscovering a love of bread making, I find myself tempted to try again. I am, widely recognised as it happens, a complete idiot. Regardless, here we go again.
For some stupid reason, probably involving a couple of glasses of wine and aspirations of an ongoing narrative on an earlier, long vanished version of The Waffle, I always named my starters Humphrey, Humph for short.
So it is that, in a make or break act of probable stupidity, I introduce you to the Day 1 status of Humph The 9th (I think).
(For the record, I’ve started with the basis of 50g good quality flour, a mix of organic white and rye, and 70ml water, with the intention of repeating that every day for the next week or so, discarding a scoop once the scent starts to give you that “am I going to kill someone with this?” feeling.)
I must be mad. But wish me luck….this had better be worth it.
*No Kilner jars will be injured in the making of this starter. Promise.
The Food Waffle 