SUCCESS!

A shot of my sunflowers blooming before I go into a monolog
of sourdough.

My sourdough adventure has taken me through highs and lows.

I decided I needed more coaching than I received at the first
bread site I used.

Their motto seemed to be, take a cup of flour and a cup
of warm water…. Go forth and multiply.

Maybe I exaggerate a bit.

After the Lurch failure I figured there had to be more to it.

After finding Wild Yeast Blog raising a starter link ,I realized failure was due to-

1- using water that was too warm plus
2- using a kitchen that was too cool

I fixed the water by using my insta-read and the cool kitchen
by shutting off a bedroom from the air conditioning and started Lurch II.

I had to lug the stuff up and down the stairs. To the kitchen to feed,
to the bedroom to grow. I felt a bit silly but my efforts paid off
along with the wonderful coaching at Wild Yeast Blog.

I didn’t have rye flour but Wild Yeast said they also had success
with wheat flour so that is what I used. I placed tape at the top
of each feed so I could see the progress.

After day one all was well

After day two all was well

After day three, just like coached, the cultured seemed dead.

It picked back up after day four and then on day five I started
feeding white flour only and left out the wheat.

This was when things slowly seemed to die again. There were bubbles
and foam but no growth for about 7 days.

I decided to experiment with the leftover feed and added the wheat back
into a separate container but left the original untainted after about
5 days.

The experiment not only doubled but tripled in 12 hours while the original
only grew to half its size, but I knew something must be up.

On the eighth day I was about to give up. The stuff was growing about
half its size each 12 hours. Suddenly after the 8th day AM feed I
checked and cheered SUCCESS! It had doubled in 4 hours!

I did begin to feel guilty about throwing out all that flour through
the process, but eventually found I could refrigerate it and use in tortillas,
waffles and even flavor regular baked bread and biscuits.

Now off I go into the field of real sourdough baking!

yeah