My starter began bubbling within a week, and smelled like sourdough! Success! I portioned out some and gave it new food. Then, it was not doing anything. It started looking rather... limp. Practically down in the dumps.
Is it just me, or does it look a little... blue?
To make a wild sourdough starter, you basically just mix the flour and water until it is a batter-like consistency, and then leave it open to the air. Whatever yeasts and lactobacilli are in the area, or on your wheat, will use the flour as food. The bacteria create lactic acid, and the yeasts create alcohol, and the acidic and alcoholic environment becomes inhospitable to other yeasts and bacteria, so it should be relatively stable.
I should mention that my doctor recommended I read "Cooked" by Michael Pollan, because I would find it interesting (so far I do!), and because he was intrigued with the method of bread-making that reduces phytates, and how great fermented foods are for us. Phytates are substances in grains meant to ward off hungry bugs, and they also bind minerals (so you aren't absorbing all your vitamins), and they irritate the intestinal wall (causing inflammation which causes a whole host of other problems). He thought having reduced phytates might be good for my upset digestive system.
So, long story short (maybe I will write a post on this later, once I have gotten it to work), a home-grown sourdough starter is an excellent way to reduce phytates in bread. It's an old method of making bread that soaks the grain for a long time, and has weaker yeasts that the human body possibly finds easier to deal with. And since I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, my local yeasts are especially yummy (SF is known for its sourdough cultures, and there is even a hotel in SF that will babysit your sourdough starter for you!).
I came home today to stir it, and it was covered in Rhizopus, the fuzzy bread mold. It occurred to me that the starter started behaving badly the day after I had cultured some Rhizopus at work for some student labs... did I bring it home on my clothes? Those spores do tend to get everywhere, but they also exist pretty much everywhere in the environment anyway.
A little galaxy of spores!
And when people say you can just skim it off the surface? Let me assure you, there is a HUGE underground network of mycelium, little fungi "roots", whenever you see mold on something. It is not just on the surface. We gave Rhizopus to students in petri dishes of transparent agar just so that they could see this phenomenon.
Perhaps, while I curate about 450 different species of fungi, starting a sourdough culture from "ambient" yeasts and lactobacilli might be a really bad idea.
I wouldn't want to end up with some Microsporum in there (which I use in lab next month)... eating ringworm can't be good for you.
Maybe I'll just stick with the yogurt and kimchi for now. Yogurt is pretty fail-safe, since I don't leave it open to the air, and it gets refrigerated quickly. And the kimchi has such hot spices in it, and is also refrigerated, so nothing much else can grow in there.
Do you ferment anything? Have you had success with sourdough?
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