Hurricane Rena's

Sourdough starter

Last week I wrote about making sourdough bread using cooked whole grain dish leftovers. Today I will write about how to make and care for the Sourdough Starter.

My first sourdough starter was given to me by a friend, she said it came from the original batch of San Francisco sourdough. I carefully fed it every couple of days until finally, I forgot. It went rotten and moldy. I had heard that I could scrape the moldy surface off and keep using it, but I didn’t want to take that chance. Maybe in the pioneer days when the nearest package of yeast was hundreds of miles away, and if I wasn’t going to see anyone else I could get some sourdough starter from, maybe then I would consider scraping off the moldy surface of my rotten starter and keeping on using it. But such is not the case in my life.

I found several recopies on the internet and one in the Lighthouse Cookbook, by Anita Stewart. Its a cookbook that celebrates the unique cuisine that has evolved among the BC coast light keepers, where self sufficiency is more than a niche or an interest, its absolutely necessary for quality of life when one only gets food supplies once a month and everything must be pre ordered. No going to the store if you forget something around there.

I actually prefer to use both yeast and sourdough starter if I make bread. This is based on the recipe in the Lighthouse Cookbook, but is my own interpretation, of how I made it when I needed to.

1 tbsp yeast

2 cups boiled water, cooled to lukewarm

1tsp salt

3tsp sugar

2 cups all purpose flour

It can be made with 1 cup of flour and 1 cup of water as well.

Dissolve the yeast in warm water, add sugar and salt, then mix in flour. Leave out on the counter, loosely covered for 3 days. I store mine in a glass canning jar, with the lid on top but not tightened during this stage.

If you have wine or beer brewing in your house, keep the sourdough starter in a different room to avoid crossing yeasts.

Stir it each day, add a little bit of flour and water each day.

After 3 days, you need to feed it equal amounts of flour and water, and also give it “air” by mixing it up in an open bowl. Leave in the bowl for an hour or two before using to make sure it is activated.

This is a good time to use some or give some away to friends.

Return some to the canning jar after, and once every 4 or 5 days, feed it a similar volume to itself of flour and water. This is the basic sourdough starter that gets kept alive between using it, and improves with age. My current one is about a year old and tastes just like the “ hundreds of years old” one I was given that was part of the original batch of San Francisco sourdough. Strange how that happens, Eh?

But that’s because the same wild yeasts live here on the west coast as lived in San Francisco centuries ago according to experts.

whole wheat bread made from leftover kutia

Eariler this week, while getting ready to celebrate Ukrainian Christams, I wrote a post about how to make healthier Kutia using sprouted wheat, and eleminate 6 hours of labour intensive preperation for a traditional Ukrainian Christmas food. Today, I will tell you about a method to use your leftover kutia from Christmas to make a beautiful loaf of whole wheat sourdough bread.

This method of bread making can use up any leftover whole grain dish. Kutia is especially good because it gives the flavour of honey, poppyseeds, nuts and fruit to the bread as well. I learned how to make bread this way when I was light keeping on the west coast of Vancouver Island. Bread does not travel very well by helicopter in boxes of other groceries, it ends up stale and squished and not that good within days of getting there. Better to learn how to make your own, a bag or bucket of flour travells well and keeps well.

So you get out your sourdough starter if you have one, and feed it. It gets fed flour and water, an equal amount to what you have of starter. Half of it gets returned to its jar. “Feeding the Pet” we say in our house, because sourdough starter is a living thing that needs to be cared for weekly if you keep it refrigerated and every couple of days if it kept in a warm place. I had a jar of sourdough starter given to me by a friend, who said it was over 100 years old, part of the original batch of San Fransisco sourdough. In my early days of sourdough baking, I forgot about it, it died and went moldy. I had to throw it out. Then I made my own from a recipie in the Lighthouse Cookbook. Funny thing, it tasted just like the 100 year old original batch of San Fransisco sourdough. I heard thats because sourdough starter captures wild yeast spors and the same wild yeasts live on the west coast now as lived in San Fransisco 100 years ago. If you don’t have sourdough starter, don’t worry about it. Just let your bread rise in the refrigerator overnight. It will become slightly sourdough within 24 hours.

In the bowl with your sourdough starter, if you have one, after you have taken some out to keep it going, refilling its home container with the same amount you took out, you mix in the leftover kutia.

You add 2 teaspoons of yeast pellets,and let the mixture sit for 4 minutes. Then you add an equal amount of flour as the mixture of liquids you are stirring together in your mixing bowl. Drizzle a little oil onto it if its getting sticky. Adjust the flour or add water to get a dough that won’t stick to your hands, or the bowl. Then knead it for 5 minutes.

Brush the dough with oil and let rise in a warm place 4 to 6 hours, or 8-12 hours in a cool place.

Once it has risen, the dough will be soft and sticky again. Flour and oil may need to be added as you punch it down and knead it again a little. Form into loafs, or put in parchment paper lined bread pans.

Let it rise again, 1 hour in its shape. Brush the top with a mixture of oil and water

heat the oven to 400 degrees. Put the bread in the preheated oven. Bake at 400 10 minutes, then turn it down to 375 and bake for 30 minutes. By this time you can check on the bread. Tap on it to determine if it is done.  A cooked loaf of bread will sound hollow, a doughy loaf will not.

This bread will be a rich reddish brown color, with a nutty flavour. The slices are hearty and rustic, with a crisp crust, and slightly sweet. Best when still warm out of the oven served with butter.

wholewheat sourdough bread made from leftover kutia

Tommorrow is the last day of Christmas around here, the final feast, the last hurrah of the holidays for another year. In my family, Ukrainian Christmas eve is celebrated with a vegitarian feast of traditional Ukrainian food. Somewhat traditional. I am going to discribe for you a dish that I make in a whole new way from the way my ancestors made it. Kutia, wheat, the staff of life, according to tradition. The process for making it in my childhood included pounding it for hours with a baseball bat in a pillowcase, boiling for hours in pot on the stove and finally mixing chopped fruit, poppyseeds, nuts and honey in it for a whole grain pudding dish which was eaten first on Christmas Eve.

I do something a little differently. I sprout the wheat first. Symbolicly, wheat represents the staff of life. However, wheat sprouts tend to occupy this place in my menatily. Organic wheat sprouts. It cuts about 6 hours off of the preperation time, adds vast amounts of nutrition, and changes a source of starchand carbohydrates to a source of vitamins. The staff of life indeed.

To honour the symbolism of the dish, one needs to make sure that the wheat being used is not geneticly modified, or sprayed with Roundup just before harvest, as a lot of conventional wheat has been known to have happen. This is actually being studied as the possible reason why so many people have developed allergies and sensitivites to the golden staff of life, so to speak. So honour our ancestor’s symbolism by using organic wheat. Anything else can hardly be considered the staff of life. Besides, it probably won’t sprout.

I get the wheat from a health food store that is sold there to be used for people growing wheatgrass sprouts at home for juicing and a superfood packed with enzymes and vitamins.

2 days previous, you fill a quart mason jar 1/3 full of organic wheat kernels and fill the rest up with water

drain the water in 24 hours, and rinse the wheat.

Rinse it twice a day for the next 2 days. There should be some splitting and tiny little wheat srouts poking out from the seeds.

The maximum nutrition from this dish would be if you were able to eat it raw, but the grains may still be too tough. Simmer gently in a pot with water or apple juice  until soft. Usually less than 1 hour.

add chopped almonds or walnuts, poppyseeds, dried cherries and honey. Blend in a food processor.

This is Kutia, a dish traditionally eaten first on Ukrainian Christmas eve representing the staff of life, which is an ironic food that a great many people have become allergic to in recent years. There are conflicting veiwpoints in society at the moment as to whether grains and wheat in particular is good for you. From wheat sprouts to white flour, from wheatgrass juice to the Atkins diet which reccomends eleminating it totally from our consumption. From being blamed for the obesity epidemic to being honoured on Christmas Eve, this is wheat, and its value, or its harm, is all in how it is prepared, and how it is grown.