… in November last year, not long after my dear Lucretia died, the very lovely Lucy who writes the excellent New Zealand based KitchenMaid blog, sent me a packet of NZ Country Sourdough Culture… it was a beautiful gesture, one that I am ashamed to say left neglected in the envelope it came in, tucked away on a shelf in the new kitchen… in fact i had totally forgotten about it until last week when I started to count my books for this months random recipes challenge…
… it’s such a glorious spring day here today in Belleau that I thought the sourdough and I were finally ready to start a new journey… so I sterilised my larger kilner jar, got out the 8 pages of instructions that came with the starter and so begins the journey…
… excuse the pun but i’m afraid it’s a bit of a non-starter really… there’s not much to say other than I added 240ml of warm water to the dried culture and then topped it up with 120g white flour and stirred … and now I have to leave it for 24 hours before I can do much else…
… my starter is created by a wonderful chap called Nev who is based in Hutt City in NZ… i’ve done a bit of an internet search and can’t find much about him although he does say in the instructions that he makes all kinds of different sourdough cultures from the classic San Francisco starter to an old world Austrian… but i’m sure you can do some research of your own… i’ll keep you abreast of activities and steps and if you want to create a starter of your own without a ready made culture, and I suggest you do… think of the fun we’ll have… you can always follow my original journey with Lucretia…
….I should have some lovely bread to show you by next weekend!
SNAP! lucky you…all the way from NZ!
I now need to start sour dough…..wonder whether I can buy that on-line? I will follow your journey with interest!
Always wanted to work with a starter and yet haven't ever been brave enough. Good luck on yours, can't wait to see how it turns out!
Let's get this straight: you had a sourdough starter and you named it? When you mentioned your “loss” I imagined that Lucretia was a pet cat or something…
BTW: have you met my pet Tofu? I call him “Silky” 🙂
Yes, I'm a little mad too sometimes!
Looking forward to seeing how the bread turns out – your kitchen is going to smell delicious!
Mary x
Good luck with this one!
So an international sourdough starter. Your post should be inspiring me to give my own sourdough starter another go, alas, my last 4 attempts have resulted in sour-slaughter so I'm too much of a scaredy cat now. I await your further posts with intrepidation though ;0)
I had to laugh, I had the same thought as Karen. ooh look what Dom is doing, I want to do it too, me me me! ha ha ha. Looking forward to joining you on your 'journey' and hope you don't get 'voted off' 😉
Great luck to you. May your new batch do Lucretia justice.
Our sourdough culture is called Levi the Levain and he's a descendant of the 50-55 year old starter belonging to the Herbert family – we were each given some to take home at the end of that baking course I did with Tom Herbert. He's a strong fellow is our Levi (wonder if I'm the only person from the class who named mine) as he can fall into a coma but be woken up again. Hoorah!
My sourdough starter is my baby too. I talk to it sometimes..
I hope your first attempt at sourdough is more successful than mine. Tasty it was, but risen it hadn't!
I've never used a sourdough starter, although it's on my list of recipes to try 😉 The closest I've come was a “friendship” bread starter from a friend. The darn stuff kept multiplying in little baggies to the point I eventually couldn't keep up or give it away fast enough 😉