Any home-cooking foodies out there?  Any of you ever bake bread using a starter?  I'm hitting Day 5 in the barm creation cycle right now, and let me say, I had no idea how easy this was.

 

The basic idea is that there's yeast bacteria that occurs naturally everywhere in the world.  So you can bake bread using Instant Yeast (or fresh yeast or whatever else), or you can bake it using the natural yeast.  Once you've got your starter dough, you use a little to bake with, then refresh what's left and keep it growing.  There are bakeries with the same starter dough culture that they've used for hundreds of years...it's used to make sourdough, gives it that sour flavor, but can make tons of different kinds of bread.

 

But how do you get starter dough?  That was always a mystery to me...but it's really simple - the yeast is already there, you've just gotta activate it.  So you take maybe a cup of flour (any kind), mix in maybe 3/4 cup of water, then let it sit and think for a day.  Next day, mix in another cup of high-gluten flour (Bread Flour) and half a cup of water, and let it sit for a day.  Next day, take out half the dough, add in a cup of flour and half a cup of water.  Next day, same thing.

 

By the 2nd and 3rd day, the culture is rising every days.  Smells like very strong beer...

 

Then for your barm, you take a cup of the culture, a 3.5 cups of flour, 2 cups of water, mix 'er up, let it sit a few hours, then pop it in the fridge.  You now have a starter dough.

 

Tonight's my "make it into barm" day, then the fridge, then bread baking Friday night!  I can't wait...

 

I'll make sure to keep you all completely up to date, blow-by-blow, in this exciting adventure...

 

Sounds wonderful! I used to bake bread a lot, although I always used the packaged dry yeast. I love the smell of it, and there are few activities that are more therapeutic than hand-kneading bread dough. I hear people rave about their bread machines, and I think, "What's the use of that? You're eliminating the best part of the experience!"

 

My grandfather was a baker by trade, but he died when I was only a year old so I don't remember him. He learned his craft in the U.S. Navy during the Spanish-American War and carried it into civilian life, and he baked at home and taught my grandmother a lot of the professional tricks. She made the most wonderful coffee cakes, cinnamon rolls, and apple dumplings in the world, and at Christmas time she turned out stuff in production volume.

 

Granddad made his own beer and root beer, too.

We have a bread machine, actually, and it's great - it's a small one, uses one package of yeast to make a half-sized loaf, so it's ready in 45 minutes.  Having homemade bread for breakfast isn't really possible - you can save time by doing the bulk raising in the fridge, but it's still a couple hours the next day before you can use it (slowly up to room temp, then punch it down, shape it, rest, let it rise, then bake it).  With this machine, I mix the ingredients, turn it on, make coffee, surf the net, start breakfast, and everything's ready by the time my wife gets up.  Wonderful.

 

But obviously no substitute for real bread baking!

 

 

Say, do you happen to have a recipe for the root beer?  When I was a kid my great-aunt Sophie used to make root beer, and it was the most amazing stuff...the sharpness of it - the difference between Dad's and Barq's is the same as the difference between Barq's and Aunt Sophie's...I need to talk with my cousins, see if they have her recipe...definitely something I want to try!

 

I think granddad's root beer recipe is probably lost forever. My grandmother knew it, but I don't know if she ever wrote it down. He died in 1941 and she died in 1960, so it's not likely to turn up.

 

There are a lot of books on wine making, home brewing and even illegal distilling, so I would imagine there are some good old-time recipes in the public domain. The old-time stuff had a little alcohol in it from the fermentation that made the fizz, and that's what gave it its bite.