Meet Gus!

The original Gus, with his friends Stomach Ache and The Pox.

This is it, I've finally fallen off my rocker. I've joined the ranks of some of the most superstitious, self-made alchemist, and cult-like group of people out there: Keepers of Sourdough Starter.

Before there was commercial baker's yeast, before there was even beer brewing from which to skim off yeast, sourdough was THE original way of capturing yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) for breadmaking. Nowadays most legit fancy bakeries still maintain some mother starter for their yummy loaves, and therein lies part of the reason why they produce yummy bread that is different than what you can make at home and why they're still in business.

Amongst laypeople, however, it is now a less common occurrence, no doubt because our parents' and grandparents' generation heralded the new technologies of mass-produced bread and commercial yeast with great enthusiasm. However, I've come across many stories from people online who have had a family traditions of keeping sourdough starters, or people who themselves have been baking with starter for decades, so the experience has not totally died out in the general population. Also, every generation or so, it becomes very trendy and popular to give it a shot. My mother and my lab advisor have both told me that they tried their hand at it in their youth (ironically enough, my research advisor says making sourdough bread was her hobby during grad school). And now with the food blogger revolution, it seems like everyone who bakes bread and writes a blog has a starter in the back of their fridge, regardless of whether they use it.

So what evil force of nature convinced me to embark on this notoriously-fussy and intuition-dependent lost art? A few things. First, many of the bread books I've been reading and getting tasty recipes from have starter recipes, whetting my interest. Second, San Francisco bread. And third, I gifted myself some really cool "baker's secret" items from King Arthur Flour (probably the baker's equivalent of Anthropologie in how many expensive and cool things they sell that make you a little weak in the knees and shut down your frontal lobe/better judgment), the primary one of which got rave reviews in sourdough recipes. Since I had a little more down-time over the break, I decided it's now or never.

So let's meet Gus! 

I won't bore you with a detailed protocol of how I cultured my starter. I followed the detailed instructions laid out by this blogger and this blogger. (You can also buy dehydrated starter and just reactivate, or use commercial yeast to jumpstart the process. But I wanted to walk on the wild side!) Suffice it to say I mixed flour and water and got the wild yeast spores present in our flour to activate and grow over the period of the last 6 days, feeding every 12 hours with new water and flour. (Also, I'll note that I worried, lost sleep, and spent long periods of time examining and sniffing my starter to see if it was going in the right direction. Obsessed? Maybe just a little.)

After 12 hours of growth post-feeding. Black line indicates original height of mixture.

Also after 12 hours of growth post-feeding. Not as much rise, but more dense bubble formation. This culture is ready to use!

My mother tells me horror stories of how quickly her starter grew and how she and her friend couldn't bake enough to keep up. (I can just mentally see her shudder as she recounts this to me on the phone.) But I think this is because she didn't toss any of her culture when she had to feed it!! If you don't, you triple the volume each time you feed it because standard protocols are usually 1:1:1 (starter:water:flour by weight). So in the end, you waste less by tossing some and keeping the culture volume low.

In the beginning, the culture is more mixed and not "mature" because the right bacteria haven't gotten a foothold to create the acidic environment that shuts down potential nasties (i.e. mold) and keeps the yeast happy. At this stage, the culture isn't usable anyways, so when you feed it, you shouldn't keep any of the extra because it's not useful and tasty.

Too bad my mother also didn't have access to more recipes back then, because in the last several days of researching online, I have found many recipes to use the extra "toss-off" in quick recipes like pancakes, waffles, English muffins, English crumpets (coming soon!), and even naan! So now that my culture has matured (it doubles nicely after feeding and is more bread-smelling-sour and yeasty), I am keeping all the toss-off in another container in the fridge for all these extra other tasty recipes! Also I will be keeping Gus in the fridge from now on so I only have to feed it every week or two, also creating less toss-off.

One last note--my starter's name. So although many people name their starter because it quickly becomes like a little pet, I read it was bad luck to name your starter before it is mature and makes good bread. But as things were going as expected and since I had a wonderful namesake, I went ahead and named it on Day 2 or 3 of the protocol. I named my starter Gus, after the GIGANTIC stuffed bacterium that Jess sent me as a housewarming gift a few years back when we moved into our current apartment (see first picture above). The little bacterium sitting on his head in the picture above I had acquired in college and always complained that it was too small to clutch like a normal stuffed toy. And then I got this HUGE handmade stuffed bacterium in the mail. Problem solved! Although Gus is not a yeast cell, it looks similar to the another important group of bugs in the starter: Lactobacillus species bacteria, who help form the acidic environment (the most famous member being L. sanfranciscensis). So Gus is aptly named.

Long live Gus! 

English crumpets (from the first round of toss offs) and first bread baking coming soon! Oh, also, happy new year!

Large batch-Gus, ready for bread making and some English crumpets!