THE ZOURDOUGH COMMUNITY

Well, The Beast is fully living up to its name. It is a very, very, active and zingy starter indeed and I now have a strong white flour version and a rye flour version. My last experiment was 50/50 white/rye starter and a flour mixture that was 4 cups of white flour and one cup of rye flour. I replaced 62g (10%) of the rye flour with Grano Arso and it has made a wonderful bread. It is dark in colour due to the rye and grano arso and fairly coarse. I did an overnight fermentation in the 'fridge after dividing the dough into two and I'm over the moon with the result. I can't recommend The Beast highly enough 🙂 so I have dessicated some of it by drying it out very slowly in my oven with only the fan going. It took a long time to become completely dry but I think the result is a successful one. Can anyone explain to me what "a 100% oven" means? That expression isn't used in the U.K. and is very baffling to me.

Hello from sunny Guildford, Surrey, England! I have great pleasure in announcing the arrival, this very morning, of The Beast. The Beast is now sitting in a mixture of flour, water and sugar in a glass bowl and I hope to hear him gnashing his teeth very soon 😁(Fairly) regular updates are likely to follow, so tighten your seatbelts and prepare for take off - or possibly even escape if The Beast gets too active!!! if the Beast lives up to his reputation

I bought couple of starters on eBay from here, but never having tried sourdough bakng I thought it would be good to try making my own starter first to work out the procedures needed to grow a starter. I'm working on day 6 and Fern is going strong. Plan is once she's up and going to dry some out in case something goes wrong she'll still be with me. Mr. Mayagi said it best " First learn crawl, then learn walk, then learn run".