Marion has been reading Little House on the Prairie to the kids for months now. Our current book is the Long Winter or something like that. Anyway, in there, it talks about how Ma started a bread sponge to make bread for a big dinner they were having at the end of the Long Winter! We are often curious and intrigued by the cooking/living that is expressed in these books and so when Marion wondered out loud ‘what is a bread sponge’? I looked it up!
What I found was SO interesting that I decided to try to make my own bread starter with Abigail as part of her History/Pioneer lessons (because surprisingly enough she is learning about the pioneers in her history lessons). Anyway, so today we started the ‘bread starter’ or ‘sourdough starter’. It will take 4-5 days before we know for sure whether this batch will go or not.
Day 1 – Mix ½ c water and 1 c flour (we used whole wheat) – cover tightly and set at room temperature for 12 hours – repeat.
Here is an excerpt from Baking911.com:
A sponge starter is started by mixing the yeast, flour and water in a bowl, covering with plastic wrap and set in warm place to ferment for less than an hour or more. When it ferments (gets bubbly and smells sour and yeasty), it can be used.A sourdough starter is a living culture that needs food, water and oxygen to cultivate, ferment and multiply and takes a minimum of a couple of days or so to get started and months to become stabile. Before there was packaged yeast, all bread was leavened by a sourdough starter. Although using a sourdough starter in baking is more unpredictable than using packaged yeast, the vibrant and sour flavor as well as unique texture that results, just can't be made in any other way. It's because you are cultivating and fermenting wild yeast (often Candida milleri) and bacteria (Lactobacillus) that feed on the sugars from the hydrated flour's starches and live and multiply in the batter. A portion is used to leaven and flavor bread and other recipes.
We are trying the ‘sourdough starter’ and if it fails…then we’ll ‘cheat’ and do the sponge starter with pre-packaged yeast! I just thought it would be fun for us to attempt to make our own from NOTHING! :0)
