Getting Started with Sourdough

Cooking with Sourdough

Cooking on the road can be murder. At the end of the day, it’s always later than you planned. You’re tired. It’s dark, cold, and threatening to rain. So that puts camping and cooking on the road in the same category as golf—I have no explanation at all for why I enjoy it, but I do.

I usually take homemade beef jerky with me on a road trip, and a couple of packages of something like Cajun red beans and rice, but I also take flour and the most important staple of all—sourdough starter. It’s a good thing I prefer a motorcycle to an airplane; I’d never get through security with my pack smelling like a winery. Sourdough gets pretty fragrant, especially in the heat. Keeping it from getting too hot can be a real challenge. I’ve used those little insulated lunch containers with a cup of ice picked up at a truck stop and thrown into a plastic baggie. You need the baggie, because the ice always melts to water…well, almost all of it melts. If I’m lucky at the end of the day there will be just enough ice left to cool down a cup of bourbon, (no room for highball glasses).

There seem to be two major approaches to maintaining, (feeding), sourdough starter: (1) sugar; and, (2) flour and water. I use the flour and water approach exclusively. I got my first inspiration for sourdough from my third grade teacher, who brought a slab of sourdough bread to class. She said it was a hundred years old. I never thought to ask at the time if she meant the starter or the slab of bread. I just sat in awe and said “Wow” like most of the other kids. Her grandfather had been a gold miner in Alaska, and cooked with sourdough. She explained the process, and the idea of doing something like that stuck with me. I knew even then than it was something I wanted to do—pan for gold and make sourdough. Actually, I have done both, although not in Alaska.

You can make an initial starter utilizing yeast present in the air pretty much everywhere. Or, you can use a packet of commercial yeast for the initial batch and focus your purity on maintaining and using your starter without any further commercial yeast infusions. Since your starter will be joined by the yeasts in the air wherever you happen to be, it’s all going to become uniquely yours anyway.

If you choose to begin the process with commercial yeast, a cup of all purpose flour, a packet of dry yeast, two cups of hot (but not boiling) water, and you’re in business. Let it sit in a lightly covered, glass or plastic container for a week, stirring it down if it threatens to leave the container, and pouring off any liquid that forms at the top. The liquid is alcohol, one of the two by-products of yeast fermentation. The other by-product is carbon dioxide, the gas bubbles that make your breads or muffins, etc. rise. After the culture has become well-established, a week to ten days, you can start using the starter for all sorts of goodies. Use it down to the last cup and then replenish your starter by adding flour and water in the same one-to-two ratio.

I’ve met a lot of other people who keep sourdough “pets”, although none yet who were crazy enough to carry it across country on a motorcycle. If you’re someone who is a sourdough devotee, I’d love to hear your sourdough story. I plan to talk more about using sourdough, and camp cooking, in future blogs. Love to have you join the discussion.