Mighty Wild Yeasties

 

   

             After I graduated from college, I went through a bread baking extravaganza. I had time. I made bagels, pita bread, experimented with various grains….and I read somewhere that there was enough wild  yeast in the air of a house that baked bread regularly to cause bread to rise without yeast. I was in New Hampshire—not the heart of sourdough country, which was on the wild and weird west coast. I did not try it. I suspected our house was too cold.  And then I went to graduate school while working  and just making our daily bread was enough to take on. I went back to buying bagels and pita bread.

                When the pandemic hit, I had already checked out a book on various methods of fermentation to learn how to make sauerkraut. And then there was the Great Yeast shortage. It was clearly time to see how much wild yeast I had in my air and, according to my book, on my hands.  I set out some flour and water on the top of the fridge and observed. Apparently, we had a lot; the mixture began to bubble quickly. A couple of weeks later, we had a sourdough starter. I made bread. It was great! I made pancakes. I made flatbreads. All excellent. It took a little longer to rise, but I had time. When school started up again, I tucked the starter in the back of the fridge and hauled it out every couple of weeks for care, feeding, and exercise, and returned to my old, yeast based recipes for daily bread.

                This weekend, Mark cleaned out the fridge and found the starter. It had been ignored for at least two months and it looked gnarly. But I smelled it and it smelled clean and yeasty, so I gave it some flour and water and set it on the stove. An hour later, Mark came out to the garden. “Have you looked at the starter?” he asked. “It’s bubbling over.” And so it was. I prepped sourdough pancakes for breakfast, fed it once more, and tucked it back into the fridge until we need another loaf of bread. Clearly, we have a lot of wild yeasties partying in our kitchen.

 

Sourdough pancakes:

2 eggs

1.25 c milk

.25 c honey (or just a good gulg…)

1 t vanilla

4T oil

1 c of starter

2 c flour (half whole wheat in our house)

1 t salt

 

Mix everything together, cover, and leave out overnight. They are a little slower to cook than baking powder pancakes.