Yeast and Sour Dough Starters

I recently got lucky enough to be given an Amish Friendship Bread starter.  The bread is easy to make and the kids love it.  It makes a sweet dessert bread and we’ve made cinnamon, banana, and chocolate chip varieties just by adding different ingredients on baking day.  The directions refer to the starter as a sour dough starter and that got me to wondering about making actual sour dough bread.   I’ve scoured the internet looking for sour dough starter recipes (since no one has given me one), and they all look about the same.  You need flour, water, yeast, time, and patience.  Here’s where the fun part comes in though – you don’t actually have to add yeast, you can allow it to gather in your starter from the air around you.  You can also add ingredients that will spur the creation of yeast and add a bit of a particular flavor if you like something specific. 

I will admit that although I have baked bread for years, I had no real idea where the yeast came from – other than the grocery store.  I always imagined it as kind of like pollen.  I could picture myself getting some cheesecloth and going outside to harvest it.  Wrong!!  It’s a single cell fungi that is all around us.  It will naturally gather in your starter and get to work.  Quite a while ago, people learned how to cultivate yeast from certain sources to produce a variety of flavors.  These help create unique tastes for wines and other spirits, but can also alter the taste of true sour dough bread.  I recently read that grape peels are a very good source for a sour dough starter.  Juniper berries can also be used.  My grape vines aren’t producing grapes yet, but we have a slew of juniper berries around here.  (At this point, you can see the wheels inside my head turning, and you know that I have to give this a try).

Here are a couple of links to sour dough starters.  If you’re feeling adventurous, you might want to give it a try.  There is also a link to a forum discussing the various successes and failures of the process.  Of particular interest to me is the one about the juniper berry yeast starter.  That’s my kind of experiment!

Here is one that collects the yeast from the air around you:  

http://www222.pair.com/sjohn/blueroom/sour.htm

Here is one that has you add a package of yeast: 

http://www.food.com/recipe/sourdough-bread-starter-13750?layout=desktop

And here is the fun juniper berry yeast starter experiment:

http://forums.egullet.org/topic/105634-juniper-berry-bread-starter/

Enjoy – and good luck!