Sour dough - starting from scratch, day 1 / Neubeginn eines Sauerteigs, Tag 1

Perhaps you know that bread is quite important in Germany. It even gave our evening meal its name: "Abendbrot" literally means "bread in the evening". Yes, we love eating bread and a lot of us love to bake it. And homemade bread is even better if you don't use yeast (or not only yeast) but sour dough.

But dealing with sourdough is kind of like having a pet: you have to care for it, take it outside and feed it regularly. If you do that - no problem, keep it in a closed jar or plastic container in the freezer. But if you forget it (because the summer is hot and long and you don't want to bake) and get the sour dough out of the freezer after three months (and not three weeks) - well, it was dead.

So now I have to start a new sour dough. It's not that difficult - it's just takes flour and water and time. OK, not every flour works. It's easier with rye but I prefer to do it with weat. The flour should be neither white nor whole-wheat but somewhere in the middle - I can't put it more exactly because flour types are so different from one country to the other. There should be no additions to the flour or such a thing. If you make it right (and with a little bit of luck) after a week you should have lively sour dough.

Now you take a a container, a salad bowl with a lid or - like I use - the bowl from the salad spinner. You put a handful of flour in it and add lukewarm water till it has the consistency of the dough you make for pancakes or waffles. Mix well, put the lid on it and put it in a warm place.

After 24 hours you take your egg whip or something like that, stir the mix well, add a little water again and then flour till it has the same consistency as before. This is when I took the photo below. Now put the lid back on it and store it again in the warm place.

10% of this post's rewards automatically go to @t-r-f, the SteemFest 2018 Travel Reimbursement Fund.