My Sourdough Journey in Lockdown

I started a SD starter in the month of May 2021 inspired  by one fellow runner.I followed this link to make the starter with whole wheat. The starter was very active with the April heat in Bangalore from Day-2 onwards. I continued the process till day 7 and ended up with lots of SD discards as I was using 120gm fresh feed every time. The rise and doubling was happening fine even though the starter passed the so-called “float test”. The pictures from that journey.

The bread baked with that starter was very sour. And I was quite disappointed honestly. After spending 40-50 hours on YouTube it was quite disappointing. I could not understand what went wrong.

Bread only has four ingredients Flour, water , salt and yeast. And incase of SD the yeast is also nothing but flour and water mixed over the last few days. Comparing it to a  cake where you have butter, sugar to cover up any mistakes here there is none. So that is why bread making is so difficult :)

Suddenly one of my friends mentioned KrumbKraft and I immediately ordered bread from them. After that I ordered from 2 more places but nothing came close to KrumbKraft, and suddenly an opportunity opened up to join virtual class with KrumbKraft and I signed up  immediately. But in the back of my mind I  was calculating that maybe I should have used that money to order their bread on a regular basis and could have bought bread for years to come :) :)

I started a new starter which somehow did not raise and was not responding at all while others in Bangalore had great progress with their starter. So after a week I started 2 more starter and once on our kitchen counter it was full of bottles. But the good part this time I was using 20gm/40gm flour as feed so discard was not huge like last time.

It was really fun to learn with others. Post the course I baked 5 bread, while my bread making skill has improved, it is going to be a lifelong journey to hone the skill of bread making.

Feel free to reach out if you are going  to bake bread. I hope I can share a few pointers which might help you. I am not going to list anything in this post as everyone’s journey is unique and never equal.