Sourdough... oh no!

Fayme recently gave a go at making a sourdough starter and baking with it. You can see her chronicle of the process at her blog The Witchery of Cookery. Things were looking really good until the last rise of the first loaf, which actually didn’t happen. We’re not sure what caused the failure but it really disappointed her and she’s about given up on sourdough.

Now, I’m not a bad cook but Fayme is a much better baker than I am. Even so, I thought it wouldn’t hurt if I gave it a try. It bugs me when things like this don’t work well and sometimes I get a bone between my teeth trying to figure it out.

I am not sure I have a lot of faith in a home grown sourdough starter so I (as usual) turned to the internet. The website Sourdoughs International has a number of great starters available for order as well as what looks like an excellent book dedicated solely to sourdough cooking.

The problem is, I’m cheap. Rather than spend money on these starters and the book I elected to send a SASE for Carl Griffith’s 1847 Oregon Trail Sourdough Starter. I have no doubt that the starters and information found at Sourdoughs International and other webpages is good, and there is an excellent chance that I will avail myself of them at a later date, but I wanted to try the free stuff first.

We just sent the SASE off today so it will be a little bit before we get the starter. Once it’s here we’ll have to grow it to a useable state before it we can think about baking. The website has a brochure available for free download that explains how to do that.

Once we get it going… we’ll see if we can’t get something tasty. I’ll let you know what happens.