Sourdough Bread?!
Sourdough Bread?
If sourdough bread is made partly from the dough from the day before, How was the first sourdough bread made?
Answers:
Yeast is pretty ubiquitous. It is in the air we breath, and it is on the wheat in the field, and therefore in the flour before it is ever added to bread. Modern baking simply domesticated the yeast beast. As breadmonk above said, the first leavened breads were most likely lucky flukes.
Sourdough starter can be made from just water and flour. You can jump start a starter using whole wheat or rye flours (since the bran tends to carry more yeast than the endosperm, for hopefully obvious reasons), then switch the starter over to white flour with each subsequent feeding. You can also jump start a starter by leaving some grapes in your initial flour/water slurry, as grapes tend to carry a lot of yeast on their skin (you can eat or toss the grapes after the first day, whatever floats your boat). You can make your starter more "sour" by keeping it more wet, or less "sour" by keeping it more dough-like.
Source(s):
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/bread-mach...
with a virgin starter, yeast, sugar and water. what I have to do everytime I forget to save a little of the dough for the next day.
A starter is made and then given to people to start their own batch of bread.......... they in turn keep out some of the starter from the batch of bread they make and give to people and so forth and so on............... There are several kinds of bread that are made like this. friendship bread - some fruit cakes and of course sourdough bread to name a few.
Sourdough is actually wild yeast or natural yeast captured out of the air. Probably some Egyptian slave mixed Nile water and barley flour to make a flatcake and left the batter out by mistake. He/she discovered that the resulting flatbread was lighter and more flavorful. Eventually they learned it was easier and more reliable to keep some dough from the day before rather than catch yeast from the air every day. The Egyptians developed the first commercial bakeries and made dozens of varities of breads, all with this natural yeast, and passed the knowledge on to the rest of the world.
My grandmother made sourdough from scratch. The yeasts and bacteria (it's both, by the way - a similar bacteria to what is in yogurt, and yeast similar to that we use for other breads) come from those naturally present in the flour and milk.
Take around a cup of milk, stir in a tbsp of sugar, then stir in enough flour to make a gooey paste. Set aside, undisturbed, in a warm place. In a couple of days (yep, days. Gross, eh?) it'll start to bubble ... or it won't, and it'll just smell. In the first case, yay, you've got a sourdough starter. In the other, pitch it, and try again. My grandmother had to try three times to get it right, but with care and proper 'feeding' this starter will last decades. Hers is over fifty, and some of it is happily resting in the back of my fridge until the weekend, when I can make bread.
Here's a link for a similar method that does not use milk. Its bacterial part would be a little different from the starter I know and love, it'd be less yogurty and more fruity scented. http://www.backwoodshome.com/articles2/b...