So you have been to the local bakery and tried that lovely mellow sour taste, and you probably been wondering how do they do that? Well, sourdough is the answer, my friend. A sourdough is a natural form of yeast that is found in the flour itself. It is there in every bake you make, but not in the same amount as you would have if you made a proper sourdough. So what you actually are doing when you make a sourdough is to cultivate the natural yeast into a big and strong enough culture to rise your bread. However, the sourdough produces lactic acid, unlike the normal store, bought yeast. And the lactic acid is one of the sour tastes that you feel when you eat sourdough bread.
Now, sourdough can be used for many types of bread but don’t forget that you can also make sweet doughs with this and I can promise you that the sourdough will definitely give an extra element to your cake.
Making a sourdough will take some time. Depending on your flour it can take up a week to get it rolling. But once you have it started you can keep it for as long as you want. Al, you need to do is to feed it once a week. If you don’t want to keep feeding the sourdough you can also spread it out in a thin layer of baking paper and dry it. After it is dry you can break off small chips and keep those in an airtight container.

Now not only does it take a long time to get the sourdough going, but it also takes some planning to cook with it. Two or three days before you plan to bake you need to start feeding the sourdough twice to three times per day. This will make sure that you get a tip-top potent sourdough that has enough power to raise your bread.
Making a sourdough on a full coarse grind is easier than making it on plain white flour. Now both the rye sour and the white wheat sour have their place in your kitchen. The lighter one for those fine sweet doughs and the rye for those coarse dark doughs. Now the reason why it is easier to make a sourdough with the bran rye is that you will find more natural yeast on the flour that contains more bran. So my recommendation to you is to make your first sour from a coarse grind of rye. When you get this going you can add a teaspoon of this to your white sour and then thin this out as you feed your dough.

So let’s get your sour power rolling, shall we?

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Sour power

Servings:1 Sourdough

Ingredients

• 1 kg of flourWater

Instructions

Day 1

• Start by mixing 50 g of flour with 50 g of water. Mix it well together and leave it in a semi-open container, at room temperature. I usually perforate a sheet of plastic, that I use to cover the mix with.

Day 2-6

• Throw out all of the yesterday's dough except one tablespoon. mix that tablespoon of dough with another 50 g of flour and 50 of water.
• At the end of day 6, you should have noticed that there are small pockets of air in the mix. If there is not you should probably throw out the mix and start over. When you spot the baubles you are ready to start preparing for baking.