I was waiting until I got my hands on whole wheat flour before I actually used my ripened sourdough starter for the first time, so I had to put the sourdough starter in the fridge. Once it’s in the fridge and no longer in a friendly, warm environment, sourdough starter begins to “sleep,” meaning it becomes dormant in the cold and needs to be reawakened for use by taking it out of the fridge, re-feeding it, and getting it to the ripe, mature stage again. Unfortunately for me, I had no idea what I was doing, and instead of re-feeding it with all-purpose flour, which is what I originally began this starter with, I thought no harm would be done if I added my new whole wheat flour. Apparently I violated a rule that says you are supposed to keep with the same flour, and the starter became far less happy and bubbly. And as a result of this, it’s been less gurgly and excited since coming out of the fridge.

This means I have more discard starter to use… even when I do not want to bake or make anything. Whole wheat sourdough crumpets are what I tried…. and what I did not realize is that the texture would be completely different than with all-purpose. As Chris said, “these are more doughy.” In other words, these are far more dense and not airy and “hole-y” the way the white flour ones are. Test and learn, I suppose?

In addition to video editing, cooking, and reading, I’ve been spending a good amount of my free time now studying sourdough and understanding how different recipes work. A few fun facts I’ve learned about making bread from a starter: it tends to be a bit more forgiving than dry active/fresh yeast, it doesn’t “rise” doubly the way commercial yeast does, and it also seems to develop more of a… “personality.” That last part can be a good or a bad thing depending on who you ask, but the die-hard bread makers will say it’s definitely a good thing. This is when cooking truly is a science, when everyone starts taking out their scales, instant read thermometers, and setting timers down to the last minute to keep track of proper, exact proofing and hydration. I’m not completely into that level of exact science (I’m also at a disadvantage now, in this very moment, because even if I wanted to be, I am not currently in possession of a scale), but this whole process is so fascinating. It’s also been interesting to see this domestic science side via our Breadheads Slack channel of a number of my fellow colleagues, who are engineers, data scientists, and statisticians by profession.

Sourdough is an art and a science. I’ve already appreciated the art, but I am still navigating the science, especially reading recipes written by these maniacally exact chefs (where everything has a gram measurement and a temperature, even the flour you use!).

I held my breath a little this evening as my alarm went off to remind me to check and feed my sourdough starter. I wasn’t sure how well it would do in our apartment given that our apartment, without the heat on, is not usually 70-75 F, but a friendly colleague let me know a hack: turn the oven light on and place the starter in there. The small space with the heat of the light would be able to do the trick. So I did that, and wow, what a difference that little light made! As soon as I opened the oven, my hands felt warm, so I knew the starter baby would be quite comfortable and cozy in there.

I stirred the starter with chopsticks and noticed that the top had crusted over, but the inside was sticky, a little sweet smelling: that’s the exact description my guide said it would ideally be today! So I fed it and placed it back into the oven. The crusty part could be avoided by making sure the towel placed on top is wet, so I wet the towel, too.

I’m on my way to becoming a sourdough starter queen!

Well, tonight is the night when I finally face one of my biggest kitchen challenges and fears: making my own sourdough starter. I’d read about this from Michael Pollan during college, that I could actually make my own starter just from filtered water and all-purpose flour given that there are all kinds of wild yeasts in everything from flour to our hands, but the thought of it kind of scared me. This would actually be a living thing, in my apartment, that would require daily and/or weekly feedings. It seemed like too much maintenance, so I pushed it off “to another time,” I thought then.

Well, “another time” has come, and I’ve started the process tonight. I didn’t have a scale like my bread-making colleagues advised me to get (I mean, Amazon isn’t really prioritizing scale orders now, right, nor is Sur La Table three blocks away considered an “essential business”), but I decided to wing it with my cup measures. If all goes well, I may be giving birth tonight to a new member of our family that will require a weekly feeding and a permanent spot in our refrigerator.

What I really want to make, though, is whole wheat sourdough, and I don’t actually have whole wheat flour. Buying flour online seems to be difficult since most places have seen a surge of demand and many are low in stock. I guess that challenge will need to wait until at least another week once this starter has (fingers crossed) ripened, and I won’t have to wait a ridiculous amount of time at Whole Foods to get whole wheat flour (the other markets around us do not seem to carry it!).