[Sca-cooks] Starter went 'Pffft'

[Jadwiga Zajaczkowa / Jenne Heise]

I think I've found the problem.
Apparently, according to English Bread and Yeast Cookery, English bakers 
make sourdough by making a tame yeast sponge and sitting it out until it 
goes sour.

Americans, however, do a three step process, where they start with the 
flour-water slurry and wait for it to bubble, then make a sponge, etc.

In other words, Americans require WILD YEAST to make a sourdough, while 
the English are content to wait for wild lactobacilli to infect a tame 
yeast sponge.

Now, here are some examples. 


One from Laura Ingals Wilder, writing of 
her girlhood in the 1870s, having little to nothing to do with San 
Francisco:

"But how do you make the sour dough?" Mrs. Boast asked.
"You start it," said Ma, "by putting some flour and warm water in a jar 
and letting it stand till it sours."
"Then when you use it, always leave a little," said Laura. "And put in 
the scraps of biscuit dough, like this, and more warm water," Laura put 
in the warm water, "and cover it," she put the clean cloth and the plate 
on the jar, "and just set it in a warm place," she set it in its place 
on the shelf by the stove. "And it's always ready to use, whenever you 
want it." -- _By the Shores of Silver Lake_

Writing in _The Little House Cookbook_, Barbara M. Walker says, "A 
sour-dough starter is leaven that develops from microscopic WILD YEAST 
and bacteria present in the air."

>From _Real Bread_ by Maggie Baylis and Coralie Castle: "A 'starter' is 
the beginning of all sourdough breads; it looks like thick pancake 
batter, is basically flour and water (some call for dry milk, another 
for potato water, etc.) that is set in a warm place where it will, you 
hope, capture wild yeast spores out of the air and maintain them... the 
older the starter, the more tangy its behavior."

from _Bake your Own Bread_ by Floss and Stan Dworkin: "What is 
sourdough? Actually, it's _free yeast_.... If you can encourage wild 
yeast to grow in a favorable medium (such as a wet and warm mixture made 
from milk and flour) they will multiply and act for you like prepackaged 
yeast-- with the major difference that the taste is a 'sour,' winey, 
rich flavor... (There are, in various cookbooks, recipes for making 
'sourdough' starter using tame yeast and flour and milk, or tame yeast 
and flour and milk and a shot of vinegar. It's not the same -- it's not 
even close. Tame yeast is tame, and only wild yeast gives you that great 
sourdough flavor.)
   If you bake with your new starter the first week, you may be 
surprised at how bland it is that first week. It seems the sourdough 
culture likes to mature for a few weeks before it hits its full flavor 
stride. It will raise your bread immediately, but the flavor needs 
maturing, at least until the second week."

>From _World Sourdoughs from Antiquity_ by Ed Wood:
"A true sourdough is nothing more than flour and water with WILD YEAST 
to make it rise and special bacteria to provide the flavor... sourdough 
yeasts grow best in a slightly acide dough, while baker's yeast does 
better in a neutral or slightly akaline one. Baker's yeast is 
represented by a single species, Saccaromyces cerevisae, while 
sourdoughs are usually leavened by multiple species in the same dough, 
none of which are baker's yeast. This mixture of yeast types contributes 
to the DISTINCTIVE SOURDOUGH TEXTURE... The wild yeasts in sourdough are 
anything but uniform, and they vary from country to country... 
...sourdough bread is the product of not one microorganism, but two. The 
wild yeast make it rise, and bacterial helpers produce the flavor. These 
beneficial bacteria are primarily lactobacilli, so named because they 
produce lactic acid, which contributes to the sour flavor. And they 
don't do it very fast. Experience has shown that the lactobacilli 
require approximately 12 hours to fully develop the authentic taste of 
the sourdough..."


-- 
-- Jadwiga Zajaczkowa, Knowledge Pika jenne at fiedlerfamily.net 
"The toad beneath the harrow knows/exactly where each tooth-point goes,
The butterfly upon the road/Preaches contentment to that toad." 
			- Rudyard Kipling