What I Did With My Stuff

In case you thought I was just dilly-dallying around, get a load of that luscious cake fresh out of the oven this afternoon. Not just any old cake, Coffee Mates. That's a Sorta Carrot cake, made with the brand new batch of sourdough -- the starter that was built with pineapple juice.

At first I wasn't sure that starter was going to do anything. A few stray bubbles now and then would tease me and keep me from pronouncing it dead but it sure didn't act like it was going to develop any kind of muscle at all. Then, two days ago, when I gave it the next-to-last feeding, it began to bubble in earnest. Yesterday, with the final feed, it went into high gear and really began to show its stuff.

Well! I said. I do believe it's time to put this pony in the rodeo. I sorted through the various recipes on my To Try list and settled on what looked like a pretty good carrot cake. I do love carrot cake and there just happened to be some baby carrots in the refrigerator.

Okay, the first thing you have to do, when you decide to build a sourdough creation, is to set out your "fresh" starter. What I've been doing this past week is building up what we'll call the Mother starter. That's the working base that, when I'm not using it, will be kept in the refrigerator to slow it down so it won't require as many feedings. So when I want to bake something, I take from the Mother the amount I'll need for the recipe. In this case, I need 1 cup of fresh -- or baby -- starter. As it happens, since the starter is brand new, 1 cup was all I had. That's okay. Here's how it works.

To that 1 cup of starter, I added 1 cup of warm water and just over 1 cup of flour. Mixed it all up good, covered it loosely and set it out at room temperature. (By the way, I heartily recommend the use of a wire whisk when mixing in the flour. Not only gets out the lumps almost instantly, it aerates the batter quite nicely.) Now, if I had taken that 1 cup of starter from the refrigerator, I would probably have had to wait until tomorrow to use the baby, which means I'd have mixed it up in the evening and left it out overnight. As it was, that little rascal bubbled and puffed and doubled itself in about 2 hours flat!

While it was building up a head of steam, I was getting the other stuff ready. The recipe calls for 1 cup of shredded carrots, to be simmered for 20 minutes in a small pot, with just enough water to barely cover the carrots. I don't shred baby carrots. Nope. Critters that little tend to cause me to shred my knuckles right along with them so I hauled out my trusty chopper instead. A few pulses and my carrots were neatly minced and plopped into the measuring cup.

Uh oh. Only about half a cup of carrots. Hmmm. Okay. The fellow who provided the recipe said one could use applesauce instead of carrots if desired. And I just happened to have a snack pack of sliced apples I did up in the dehydrator this last summer. Cool. Whipped those puppies through the chopper and mixed them in with the carrots. Lookin' good.

Uh oh. I've still only got 3/4 of a cup of Stuff. Hmmm. Aha! I just happen to have some dried apricots. Tossed a handful of them into the chopper, mixed them with the carrots and apples and ta-dah! One cup of minced mixed Stuff. Perfect. I barely covered the mixture with water and what was left of the pineapple juice I had used to build the starter, set it on the burner and left it to simmer its little heart out.

When the baby starter looked to be at it's peak, I measured out the 1 cup I needed for the cake and put the remaining cup in its storage bowl. That is now my Mother, which will grow according to how much and how often I feed her.

In the KitchenAid bowl, I creamed 1/4 cup of butter with 1/2 cup brown sugar and 1/2 cup white sugar. Added 1 egg and beat the bejaysus out of it. Added 1 teaspoon salt, 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg, 1/4 teaspoon cardamom, and 2 teaspoons baking soda and mixed it all in good.

In a separate bowl, I mixed together the 1 cup of baby starter, 1/4 cup of milk and 1 1/2 cups of flour. Started mixing it up. What the hell? It was the consistency of biscuit dough. That can't be right.

It wasn't. I'd forgotten to add the 1 cup of carrot-apple-apricot Stuff! Quickly tossed that in -- and it was probably actually more than a cup because the minced apples swelled up with the moisture they absorbed -- and mixed everything good. Much better. Dumped that lot into the sugar mixture and let the KitchenAid finish the job while I buttered a springform cake pan.

Now, the recipe calls for one of those rectangular baking dishes but I felt like using the spring form. Consequently, I had a thicker cake than I would have otherwise, which meant it had to cook longer. Set the oven at 350 degree fairyheight and slid the pan in. With the larger pan, 40 minutes would have been fine. The springform took an hour before the toothpick came out clean.

The cake is beautifully moist, as carrot cake should be, but not too sweet, as carrot cake sometimes is. After it cooled, I mixed up a quick frosting made with butter, powdered sugar, about a teaspoon of grated ginger and about 1/4 a cup of orange juice. You can see the result below. The piece that's sliced off is, of course, history.

Now I have to walk up to the market tomorrow and get some more flour. I'm out and my next project is going to be sourdough biscuits. Think I'll get some sausage, too. Biscuits and sausage gravy would be a pretty good football meal come Sunday.

Hold That Hooch!

You know, I don't believe it ever occurred to me there might come a day when I would actually be showing, with button-busting pride, a photograph of ... bubbles?

Well, gee, it only seems fair. This is, after all, the first time I've ever tried to stalk and capture the wily wild yeasty beasty and, lo! There is the bubbly evidence, in front of my astonished eyeballs, on Day Two of the starter's existence. This is the traditional starter, you might recall, and this is what it looked like just before I added today's serving of flour and water. I keep climbing up on the step stool so I can check it again -- and again -- and it's still bubbling. What an eager little feller.

The pineapple starter doesn't seem to be doing much of anything, except smelling good. It's probably dreaming of balmy tropic breezes and not paying attention. Maybe I should play Don Ho's "Tiny Bubbles," just as a suggestion. Do you remember how that goes? "Tiny bubbles in the wine ..." Very appropriate, that wine reference, since what we've got here is a bio-distillery of sorts.

Neat segue into the promised subject of hooch, eh?

Hooch, you will remember, is that liquid that floats on top of the starter and smells alcoholic -- because it is. The little yeast fellers and the little lactobacilli fellers have a team thing going in there. Together, they feast on the flour and produce a lot of carbon dioxide and alcohol. The more hooch that appears, the less food there is for the beasties.

Apparently there are those who are willing to drink this particular beverage when there isn't any properly distilled stuff left in the popskull jug and the white lightnin' jar is empty. I was going to taste the hooch on my domestic starter this morning, just to see what it was like, but I forgot. Guess I'll have to wait until tomorrow and try to remember before feeding time so I can report to you. You are dying to know, aren't you? Of course you are.

What is interesting to me is that the hooch can be used for other things as well as bread. For instance, there is one fellow really into fermenting pickles and hot sauce and he uses sourdough hooch in the process. In fact he makes his sourdough starter with the liquid/flour ratio just backward from what it would be for bread because he wants it strictly for the hooch.

Another possible use of hooch is, at this point, still a mystery to me. In Alaska they have something they call Sourdough Sauce. My understanding is that it's supposed to be sweet and tangy -- or maybe it's sweet and spicy. One of the railroad menus features a wild game dinner with the meat braised in sourdough sauce. But do you think I can find a recipe or even a pitiful clue as to what it is? Nooooooo. But you would think it's the hooch they're using, wouldn't you? Makes sense to me.

I don't know whether I can attribute this to the hooch or not but one web page, in discussing the long history of sourdough, mentioned it has been used to help heal burns and wounds. Hey! I sat right up when I read that because, as it happens, I burned the ring finger on my left hand today. Nothing serious, not even a blister -- just one of those burns that annoy you with a low-grade, persistent pissant pain. Well! I went right to the jar of domestic starter and dipped my forefinger into the top froth -- where the hooch begins to build -- and dabbed a bit of it right onto the burn.

Shazzam! It immediately cooled the heat. As it dried, it formed a thin skin over my finger and now, an hour later, the pain is still simply gone. Don't know if I'd want to do that with a serious burn but it's sure handy for the dinky annoying one. You may file that under Possibly Useful Trivia.

Now if you will excuse me, I need to take my lovely hula hands and go shake the daylights out of the pineapple starter again.

The Great Sourdough Throwdown

There are several definitions for the term throwdown and not all of them are pleasant. In this instance, I'm using it as a verb: "To make something happen in a big way. To perform well, brilliantly, with virtuosity." I'm not only inviting y'all to join me, I'm going to do my best to make it absolutely as easy and muss 'n' fuss free as I can. Yes, you, too, can throwdown like a champ.

Why the focus on sourdough? Well, several reasons. For one thing, it's totally versatile and, in spite of its name, is not always "sour." In fact the term "sourdough" is actually fairly recent, stemming from our Gold Rush days. In the real world, the use of wild yeast to leaven breads has gone on for thousands of years, long before anybody came up with domestic yeast.

For another, wild yeast breads are healthier and more digestible than other breads. Quoting from an article at Notebook, sourdough is number one on a list of 20 Super Foods: "Naturally fermented sourdough starters produce a tremendous amount of enzymatic activity, breaking down starch and gluten in the flour. Because of this, sourdough bread is much easier to digest." Folks with assorted allergies and similar problems can often effortlessly assimilate wild yeast breads when they can't go near any other kind.

Still another reason: the built-in Zen of getting back to basics, of really noticing fundamentals and blissing out on them. Hey, it only looks complicated if you haven't done it. I promise, sourdough bread craft is not only hugely satisfying, methods have been discovered that make it happen almost like magic. While it will take longer to develop the rise and the flavor of a loaf, the actual time you have to spend doing anything is less -- and so is the effort expended. On the other hand, that is quality time. You get to have the fun without raising a sweat.

Sourdough lends itself so totally to artisan breads that you can't help but have fun exploring the different shapes and flavors. But it's not limited just to breads. You can do your pancakes and your waffles and your muffins and -- brace yourself -- you can even make sourdough chocolate brownies!

So come on, Coffee Mates. Just for the sheer fun of it, let's explore and discover. I don't want to alarm anybody but the holidays are pressing fast upon us. Wouldn't it be neat to learn how to effortlessly whip out a few gift baskets or bags or boxes with your very own perfectly baked artisan loaves of nirvana?

The usual suspects are all gathered in the lineup for your inspection. What we have here are three sourdough starter batches. The middle one is a flour and water mixture powered by domestic yeast and, though only two days old, has already produced two loaves of delicious bread and one batch of gingerbread cake that I'd rather not discuss. (But I'll explain later.) The bowl wearing the shower cap (just kidding) was started today and is geared to gather in wild yeast. It uses the same basic flour and water combo but because the proportions are different, it's a thicker mixture than the other two. The plastic container on the right is also a wild yeast trap and decidedly non-traditional, in that it uses pineapple juice as the liquid for the first couple of phases.

A couple of things you should know about the care and feeding of your yeasty beasties: you can keep them happy in plastic or crockery or glass but don't use metal unless it's stainless steel or enameled. As for lids, make sure they're loose-fitting unless you like the excitement of having stuff blow up all over your kitchen.

While you're waiting to see evidence that you have successfully lured a colony of yeasty beasties to live with you, you can safely keep the starter out at room temperature. Atop the refrigerator is good. The air is warmer up there and the container will be out of your way as well as undisturbed. Also, once you start actually making bread with it, as long as you are using it at least once a week, you can keep it out. Otherwise, it's best to store it in the refrigerator, where it will go into semi-dormancy and you won't have to feed it as often.

The art of sourdough can be as complicated or as simple as you choose it to be. There are countless sources of good information only a Google away. Don't let the quantity overwhelm you and don't let the contradictions confuse you. Browse for the big picture and keep in mind, whether they agree with each other or not, those methods all work for somebody. Half the fun is deciding which method you want to try. Speaking of which, our first choice is the starter.

ONE: This one will have you making bread the fastest because you're going to use domestic baker's yeast. Your flour-to-water ratio is a matter of preference. I keep it equal. One cup flour and one cup warm water and one package (2 1/4 teaspoons) yeast. Mix well. Keep at room temperature. It will bubble and froth and increase in volume when the yeast starts working. Then it will drop back down and will develop a layer of clear, yellowish liquid on top. If you lift the lid and inhale, it will smell just a bit like beer. That's because your little yeasty beasties are producing alcohol in there. This is, after all, a fermentation process.

The liquid is known as hooch and this is one of those things folks disagree about. Some say to pour it off and others say to stir it back in. I'm from the "stir it back in" school. All it is, is a signal from the yeasty beasties that they've cleaned their plates and would really appreciate it if you'd feed them again. Give them some more flour and water and they'll be perfectly happy.

TWO: This is a very basic, traditional starter that follows a schedule and starts off small. If you don't see any evidence of action after a week, toss it and start again. The first day, mix together 2 tablespoons of flour and 1 1/2 tablespoons of warm water. Loosely cover the container and leave at room temperature for 24 hours. On the second day, add more flour and water, in the same amounts, then cover and set out for another 24 hours. Do the same thing each day for six or seven days. You should start seeing little bubbles by the third day but don't give up if they haven't shown up yet. By the end of the week, you'll have about a cup-and-a-half of starter which you can now transfer to a permanent container and refrigerate. Assuming, of course, that it's bubbly and active.

THREE: This one takes just a bit more fussing but nothing serious. You just have to remember to give it a stir two or three times a day but I wouldn't worry about it if you happen to forget. This time you mix 3 1/2 tablespoons of flour with 1/4 cup unsweetened pineapple juice. Cover and set aside for 48 hours but give it a stir 2 or 3 times each day. On the third day, add 2 tablespoons flour and 2 tablespoons pineapple juice. Go for another 48 hours, stirring 2 or 3 times a day again. You should start to see some activity during this phase. On the fifth day, add 5 1/4 tablespoons flour and 3 tablespoons warm water. Mix, cover and set aside for 24 hours. On the sixth day, add 1/2 cup of flour and 1/4 cup warm water. The starter should be good to go at this point. You can see an excellent video about this at Breadtopia.

Your choice of flour in any starter is up to you. Whole wheat or rye is suggested in the very beginning because they are likely to have more of the desirable yeast spores and bacteria. I really would have liked to use the whole wheat myself but I'm out, at the moment. That's okay. The all-purpose flour will do fine.

So you choose which of the above starters you want to mess with. Tomorrow I'm gonna tell you more about the hootch. How's that for a cliffhanger?