A Second Start

Start again!! really good instructions on making and keeping your starter is so hard to find. I've been doing a bit of research online and found a few good youtube demo's but the best place to date, surprisingly was Jamie Oliver's website, There he writes about a seven day starter recipe...so this is what I'm going to follow.
I really wanted to use the recipe from a book I purchased last year, 'Wild Sourdough' by Yoke Mardewi, beautiful photographs and feel to the book..the bread recipe's are wonderful but the information for making the 'starter' was very limited and was not the right starter that she used for most of the recipes in the book...she made a liquid starter with a 1:1.5 ratio of flour to water and most of the recipe's use 1:1 ratio of flour to water...which is not a liquid starter...being a novice at making sourdough and the price of organic flour you really don't want to keep experimenting and stuffing up..you want to get it right.

So here goes my second attempt...it's day 5 for my starter and I've already tossed out 200g of starter and replenished it with 1 cup of flour to 1 cup of water.....

I used a electronic scale to measure accurately how much starter I had and how much I was removing.

I did read somewhere that the starter I'm removing can be used for bread making..so to experiment I made a simple white sourdough with my spelt four starter... pain au levain

  

 Weighed and mixed all the ingredients...

just mixed it enough to make a ball of dough..It was then left to rest for 20 minutes
And then the fun started..air kneading..this involved lifting and slapping the dough onto the table for 5 minutes...the change in the dough's appearance and texture was amazing!

Very silky and elastic...which is just what you want....it was then left to rise for 6 hours...which was time well spent painting and making dolls..:)

Did the dough rise after all this time...maybe hard to tell...feeling frustrated...but still the dough looked and smelt sweet...so I continued on, after all it was only an experiment...after placing the dough into its tin and leaving it to rise in a warm oven for another 2 hours...it was late evening by now.....not much change had happened...but I baked him anyway...and here he is he may not have risen and weighs a tonne but he tastes pretty dam good...I call him "The Pontville Brick'

see how he almost resembles the stones in the wall....he was very yummy and went well with my home made seville marmalade!

Off to add 100g of flour and 100g of water to the starter...should have close to a 600g less liquid starter.