Wild Yeast. Northwest Sourdough. How to Make a Sourdough Starter: Day One — Pinch My Salt. Today we begin the great sourdough starter experiment. The goal of this experiment is to catch some wild yeast and try to keep them happy so that they will multiply. By harnessing the power of wild yeast in a sourdough starter, we’ll eventually be able to bake bread without using any commercial yeast at all. That’s what traditional sourdough is – a bread leavened by wild yeast.
The process can be very technical and scientific, but I’m not going to delve into all those boring details right now. Instead, we’re just going to jump in and get started and I’ll explain things as we go. There are several different ways to create a sourdough starter and I don’t know that any one method is truly better than the others. Here’s how I started: I mixed one cup of whole wheat flour with 3/4 cup of room-temperature pineapple juice in a bowl until everything was well blended. Want to create your own sourdough starter? Here are the instructions (click on the links for photos): Day Seven: Same as above. Science of Bread: Basic Sourdough Starter Recipe. In addition to flour, water, and yeast, your starter also contains bacteria. When these bacteria feed on the sugars in flour, they produce acidic by-products. This is what gives sourdough its sour taste. Actually, all doughs contain at least some bacteria. So why aren’t all breads sour? Sourdoughs and other raised breads also differ from one another because of the eating habits of the yeasts that make them rise.
TMF: baking bread / Living Below Your Means.