Sourdough Starter and its Importance.

Sourdough.

Who doesn't like the smell of fresh bread or pizza baking in the oven? It brings up so many memories for me, of being with my grandma at her house while her every-other-day bread baking was going on. Delightful fragrance!

I've been working on a recipe for perfect, pizzeria-style pizza for well over a year. I got it to a spot where it tasted great, but it wasn't yet like the pizza I'd had at a little, family-owned pizzeria about 20 years or so ago. My crust tasted good, had nice texture, but...it still wasn't right. I finally found a website that gave really good, common-sense explanations for the hows, whys and wherefores of creating the perfect pizza crust. Now, I couldn't follow those instructions to the letter, but the spirit of the methodology, along with percentages of water vs flour, made the light of comprehension dawn. It was sort of like a big rock falling out of the sky and landing splat on my head. I finally realized what I was missing.

A sourdough starter!

So, I researched and checked, read about many different schools of thought for creating a sourdough starter, and ended up trying it over a few weeks to get it how I thought it tasted right. Let me also say that I'm not a big fan of sourdough bread (as in the sliced, grocery-store kind used for sandwiches). I don't hate it, I just don't love it. But somehow I knew, that was the missing ingredient in my pizza dough.

Sourdough starter isn't just for pizza, though. I remember seeing my grandma using a cup or so of sourdough starter, right out of the refrigerator, in her pancake batter. She used it in lots of things, in fact. But it hadn't ever really clicked in my head that it might be a great little boost for making perfect breads.

Pizza dough, by my definition, should be able to be thin or thick. If thin, it should be flexible but not tough or rubbery; tender yet able to support the weight of the sauce and toppings. That was a hard balance. I discovered that if I let my bread dough rest between steps, it helped hugely with the flexibility. If I made the dough and refrigerated it BEFORE it would rise--and left it in there, in a tightly-covered dish for a couple or three days before I needed it--it was FANTASTIC. Perfect. All the flavors combined--just flour, water, yeast and salt--to create this old-style pizzeria crust that is incredible.

But I digress. The starter is the heart and soul of it all.

I know there are those who disagree with certain methods of creating your first "mother" starter but I tried a few and this worked best for me.

3 cups white flour

3 cups water, room temperature

1 scant teaspoon dry yeast

1 teaspoon honey

Combine all four ingredients in a glass container and stir thoroughly. Cover with plastic wrap and set the covered bowl on a cookie sheet on the counter. The cookie sheet is to keep any overflow, should that happen, from making a big mess. If your starter rises up, just stir it down. Leave it on the counter for 2-3 days, in a cool but not cold location. The flour and water may separate (mine do) but you just stir it up again to use it. Bubbles will form on the top sometimes; that's normal and part of the fermentation process.

To use it, just add a cup of your starter to your bread mixture as you're making the dough. I didn't do anything really fancy to make my pizza dough, I just added the starter along with the water and yeast, stirred it up, then added the flour and salt in small amounts until the dough was less like heavy bread dough and more like a very thick batter. VERY thick batter. Then I just let my mixer do its thing for 7 minutes or so. I dump it out onto a floured counter and knead in just enough flour to be able to handle the dough without it sticking to everything. Then I let it rest for 10 minutes or so before cutting it into three or four pieces (WET pieces) and storing them in individual plastic bowls with lids and placing them in the refrigerator until I'm ready to make pizza or bread or whatever bread I'm wanting that day. I use the refrigerated dough within a week at most because I'm not all that fond of extremely fermented sourdough.

I'm convinced that the starter I use makes all the difference in the taste, texture and final outcome.

One thing: Be sure you add another cup of flour and 1/2 to 3/4 cup of water (more water if you want) to the "mother" starter you used from, just to keep her going. Store in the refrigerator between uses. Stir it every day or two (some people disagree with that but...).

Use your imagination to create all kinds of special foods with your starter. My grandma's pancakes were the best, ever. I'm going to try making some pancakes with it tomorrow, myself!

Happy Baking!