It's alive!

Sunday

This morning I was pleasantly surprised to find some growth in my starter.

The red arrow shows where the starter was when I fed it.  You can see that it had about 50% growth after 12 hours.  I was eager to try it out, so opted to try making a loaf of bread using my starter supplemented by commercial yeast.  I adapted a tried and true bread machine recipe for whole wheat bread.  I needed to guess about how to adjust the flour and water amounts to compensate for the flour and water contained in the starter.  I underestimated the water I needed at first.  The first mixing cycle from the bread machine made several balls of dough and left a lot of flour around the edges of the pan.  No problem.  I just added some more water and started the cycle over.

	Original recipe	Sourdough version
Sourdough starter	None	1 cup
Water	9 oz.	5 oz.
Whole wheat flour	2 ¼ cups	2 ¼  cups
White flour	1 ¼ cups	¼ cup
Salt	1 ½ tsp	1 ½ tsp
Butter	1 ½ Tbl	1 ½ Tbl
Honey	¼ cup	¼ cup
Yeast	2 ½ tsp	1 ½ tsp

The result was a successful loaf of bread.

It didn't have a strong sourdough taste, but there was a hint of it.  Whole wheat isn't really a classic sourdough bread type.  Now that my starter is showing more life, I'll try a more traditional sourdough recipe next week.

Next: My starter is fully grown