there's a monster on my counter

it's really very scary. it's gooey and bubbly and it sits there all day...staring at me. yes.
and the crazy thing is: I CREATED IT!

ok. maybe it's not a monster. i suppose it's actually a pretty friendly beast. in fact, it's very helpful.

what i have in a bowl on my counter is a large dollop of living flour (a.k.a. a wild yeast bread starter). it sits there and fizzes, waiting for it's daily feeding of more flour and water. every day, i take our roughly half of the starter and add precisely 100 grams each of flour and water to the mix that remains. the roughly half that is removed can either be used to bake with (a long but surprisingly simple process) or composted.

maybe it's time for a little bit of backstory on my new pet?

well, it all started when jakeb bought me a subscription to urbanfarm magazine for christmas. in this particular issue, there was an article on making bread without yeast and with kneading. so...i gave it a shot.

it turns out that the bread that i'm currently making (the first loaf is in the "first fermentation" phase right now) only requires three ingredients: flour, water, and salt. it's simple enough, the most complicated part is caring for the starter every day, which isn't really that hard at all (so far...i haven't actually gotten all the way through making a loaf of bread yet. it takes 11 hours o_O)

the starter is the yeast of the bread recipe. i recently discovered that there is yeast that lives in flour, any flour, and you can cultivate it by fermenting (i think) the flour. that's what the starter really is; it's a yeast farm!

the yeast from the yeast farm then goes into my bread, hopefully making it amazing.

we'll see how this first loaf turns out. wish me luck!