Adventures in sourdough

I love sourdough breads. I love the slight tartness of the taste, that slightly rustic texture and I absolutely adore the concept of harvesting wild yeast. The very idea makes me think of the baker as a hunter - coming back successful from the hunt and feeding his family on the spoils. Okay, so the organisms you hunt are single-celled and rather tiny, but it's still a pretty cool image.

The problem with sourdough is keeping your starter going. It had always been that much too difficult for me to do - living in college, someone was bound to throw my starter away, thinking it was milk that had gone off or something. But now I'm in a flat with two others who like to bake, so I think they might just be willing to put up with my funky-looking sourdough starter in the fridge. The time for talk has passed - it's time to get hunting!

So here's step one of my first ever sourdough loaf. Let's go hunt and tame some yeast! I'm basically following the bread bible's procedure for sourdough.

Sourdough Starter
Ingredients

• Flour
• Water
  

Method

1. Whisk together ~150g flour and ~250ml water in a lidded container, incorporating as much air as possible.
2. Put a lid on and leave in a warm place until signs of fermentation are seen.
3. Whisk in another ~150g flour and ~250ml water and leave for another day.
4. Tip out half of the starter and replace with ~150g flour and ~250ml water.
5. Leave in a cool room.

Sounds simple, right? Well, hopefully it should be! I'm using M&S strong wholemeal flour for mine, and I've only got as far as step 1. But here are some photos anyway! This is how much flour I used (it's a 1 litre container).
With this much water.And that makes this much batter! It's not very exciting yet...