Feeding Fred.

I was sitting around near the end of August looking for something to do while mindlessly surfing the web and ran across an article on bread. This got me thinking about how homemade bread would have been made 100 years ago (I was cruising vintage photos at the same time). I started looking into sourdoughs, many of the recipes I was finding called for store bought yeast, which to my thinking is cheating and the end result isn't a true sourdough. After searching around a bit I came across a very simple recipe that only used equal parts of flour and water, I figured that was simple enough for me to at least make an attempt and if I failed I was only out a little of my time and a few cups of flour. Besides, if I felt really desperate, I could always send away for a starter from Carl Griffith's 1847 Oregon Trail Sourdough Starter webpage.  Carl passed away a few years ago and his friends are keeping his tradition alive of sharing his sourdough with anyone that asks  for FREE! If you are interested, please check out the website.

Luckily, I didn't have to send for Carl's sourdough because mine took off after the second day. Many of the sites I had looked at recommended that once things got moving along to name your creation so that you would be less likely to forget to feed it. Thus Fred was born. Fred mostly resides on the back of  the counter behind the stove in a Ball widemouth mason jar that once housed Janak's Country Market Dill Pickles while I'm letting him mature. I've already tried using him a few times to make a simple bread but he seems to peter out  and I don't get much of a rise out of him, but the flavor is almost spot on.  I'm not sure if I over worked the dough but I recently changed out the type of flour I was feeding in hopes of getting better results and instead of a traditional loaf of bread, I want to try  a biscuit recipe .

I fed Fred this morning and while I was writing this he decided to take off and over flow his pickle jar so I removed about a cup and stuck him in the fridge to slow him down a bit.   Now it looks like I'm trying that bread recipe again a little sooner than I planned!