Hello everyone. I baked my first sourdough loaves and while the bread was tasty (especially slathered with some nice salted butter) I think it was more valuable as a learning experience. 
The recipe I followed is more like a formula and is known as the 1, 2, 3 formula on several websites. It was devised by a French food blogger named Flo Makanai, who introduced it to American sourdough bakers out of curiosity to see if her formula worked with american style flours. You may see her original post in English here: http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/9346/123-easy-formula-sourdough-bread

A few bakers have tried her formula, but the one whose example I followed was blogger and baker Shiao Ping on sourdough companion. http://sourdough.com/recipes/home-bread

As a novice sourdough baker I still have quite a bit of learning to do. The main question for me is regarding the timing of feeding the starter and then using the starter. For this initial attempt at baking I decided to just use my starter pretty much straight out of the fridge. I had fed it on Wednesday night and I was baking on a Saturday. That morning I had to go run some errands, so I pulled the liquid starter out of the fridge and let it sit on the counter for a couple hours while I was out. When I returned home I decided to make two loaves, one using the liquid starter and one using the sponge starter. Hence, the sponge starter did not get a chance to come up to room temperature before I used it.

I wanted to make 1.5 pound loaves, so using the 1,2,3 formula the ingredients were as follows for each loaf:

4 ounces by weight starter 
8 ounces by weight warm water
12 ounces by weight whole wheat flour (I used Bob's Red Mill)
1 generous teaspoon salt (I used Real Salt)

Hence forth all steps were carried out twice, once for Dough 1 (liquid starter) and again for Dough 2 (sponge starter).

I stirred up the liquid starter and weighed out 4 oz. and poured 8 oz of warm water on top. I stirred that up until it was a thin slurry and then mixed in the flour. I covered it and set it in my oven with the light on for half and hour. This is the "autolyse" period, where the goal is for the flour to absorb the liquid.

I did the same for the sponge starter (which I believe is 75% hydration) except I had to cut it into little pieces and then smush it in the water with my fingers. 

After half an hour I did some stretch and folds of the dough within the bowls. I did not count how many, but I did it until it seemed to resist. I oiled the bowls, turned the doughs, covered and stored in the oven.

Every hour for 3 hours I stretched and folded the doughs, but I think I was too rough and ended up kneading out most of the gas bubbles.  Dough 1 was softer and easier to stretch, while Dough 2 retained more of its shape and it was easy to see the folds. They both rose and had nicely sized bubbles.

At the end of the 3 hours I let the doughs sit for another half hour, Then shaped them into batards. I don't have any fancy proofing baskets, so I just used a couple plastic containers and lined them with floured cotton cloth. The batards proofed for a final two hours.

At this point I realized I had deflated my dough and that the final proof was probably not going to restore the rise. Ah well.

When It was time to bake I preheated my oven to 500 degrees with an old pan in the bottom.  I placed the batards on a cookie sheet, slashed them down the middle with a razor, and measured out a cup of water. I slid the cookie sheet into the oven, threw the water at the hot pan in the bottom, sloshed most of the water onto the floor of the oven, and shut the door.  I lowered the heat to 450 degrees and baked the loaves for 35 min. I pulled them out, checked the temperature with a probe thermometer and they measured 211 degrees. My target was 200, but 211 is acceptable.

I let the batards sit for 3 hours before slicing them. 

Assessment:
The bread had a very dark brown crust and a very dense crumb. The batard from Dough 1 was flatter than the one from Dough 2. The flavor was identical. The bread was hearty and not sour, which is fine with me. I prefer less sour bread. The crust was crunchy and chewy. Batard 2 had a better tear at the slash when baked, but both loaves cracked at the edges. I don't know if that is because I didn't slash deep enough, or if I baked it at too high a temperature.

Next time I will be more careful when stretching and folding. I also will feed up the starter more before baking. I also might try baking the loaf in a dutch oven, or using ice cubes in the oven for steam, rather than water. 

Due to technical difficulties, I have no pictures to share today. I hope to get the situation sorted out soon. My starter is showing steady activity, with small slow bubbles breaking through the surface. All the guides to starter say that if it is not doubling in size by now to just leave it alone and not to feed it. I will continue to stir it and observe it. It's hard to leave it alone, because I really want to feed it! I suppose the point of leaving it alone is for the yeast to reach a critical mass.

Tomorrow I am leaving on a short staycation at a bed and breakfast. It looks like little baby sourdough will have to go along. I hope room service doesn't pitch it, or call the health authorities... While on vacation Honey and I plan to visit a goat dairy that is nearby. Actually the location of the goat dairy determined the selection of the B&B. I mean, who would not choose their accommodations by their propinquity to goats? Goats! and they have cheese! This is going to be awesome. The farm is open for curious city slickers to explore and they have  lots of baby goats being born right now.  And did I mention they have cheese? They are decorated with flower petals. Flower petals!

Honey brought up a good question, "Do they sell goat on the goat farm?" Somehow, I doubt it. Or, if they do, they do it quietly out the back door. There's plenty of information on the website about the the cheese, the milk, even the wool. They have guided tours so you can meet the goats, but nothing on how you can eat the goats. I suppose I'll just have to ask. 

One of the things I (and everyone else) love about food blogs is the photography. Blogs seem to be full of gorgeous pictures of artfully accessorized morsels arranged in a perfect composition by the golden ratio. It all inspires lust and envy. And hunger. Alas, I am a novice when it comes to photography, but one thing I do know is to use natural light. Yes! Great! Natural light is free and requires no special equipment! What to do when you live in the fog end of San Francisco? Rats.

This is all to explain the picture of my baby sourdough starter sitting on the rail of my back stairs. There is one tiny patch of natural light that enters my kitchen. Sure, I can place my target in that brave little puddle of light, but my kitchen is yellow: the walls are yellow, the counter is yellow. Everything looks like it has jaundice. Not sexy for food photography. Natural light comes from outside, so outside I went. Thankfully the air was still and didn't knock the starter down onto the yard below... I would cry.

In my quest for health and nourishment, I've come to the point where I've decided to try baking my own sourdough bread. Why? Not because I live in the land for which Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis is named, but because sourdough is healthier for you! Who knew?

For those of you who are not familiar with the food science behind the Paleo diet and nourishing traditions movements, I will explain briefly. Grains contain a  substance called phytic acid which is considered to be an antinutrient because it prevents you from absorbing important minerals such as calcium, magnesium, iron, and zinc. Phytic acid content in food can be decreased by fermentation, soaking in acidic solution, and sprouting. People who eat Paleo/Primal Diets have decided to swear off all grains and legumes. People who don't want to abandon beans and cereal go the Nourishing Traditions route and soak/ferment/sprout their food. 

I've decided I am not going to give up on lovely things like oatmeal, rice, beans, bread, and tortillas. I'm Mexican, damn it! That leaves me the soaking/fermenting route. After noticing my loaf of megamart bread happily sit on the pantry shelf for weeks without any ill effects I took a closer look at the ingredient list. Eek! Monoglycerides, calcium propionate, calcium sulfate, DATEM... and this is on top of 3 different sources of sugar. Time to bake my own bread.

It turns out that you don't have to soak your flour in crazy stuff (kefir, buttermilk, whey, apple cider vinegar, or lemon juice) to make it more digestible. In fact, soaking your grains/flours in dairy doesn't help at all. The calcium in dairy inhibits phytic acid breakdown. See here for more info. What to do? Sourdough baking is a well established, non-weird process that also happens to reduce the phytic acid content of flour. Much heartened, I looked around for information on making my own starter and found The Pineapple Juice Solution (not to be confused with the 7 percent solution). There are several other places online with directions for this starter, like here and here. They all use different proportions and timing. At first this was confusing, but then I took it to mean that this process is very forgiving and pretty hard to screw up.   

I bought a jar of organic pineapple juice, and a couple scoops of organic stone ground whole wheat bread flour from the bulk bins at my local hippy coop store. I couldn't wait to start my project, so I grabbed a pint tub from my Honey's cupboard and stirred the ingredients together at his house. The directions I tried to follow are located here. The trouble I ran into was how to measure the flour. I recently learned that you are supposed to gently spoon your flour into the measuring cup then level it off with a butter knife. How do you do that with tablespoons? Are you supposed to spoon the flour into the spoons? Is that too meta? I ended up with too much flour in proportion to the pineapple juice and got a paste instead of the slurry shown in the video. That's when I turned to the interwebs for more information and found all the other directions that I listed above. Encouraged by the level of variation I added more juice to my paste until it became a slurry and left the pint tub on top of the fridge. Every 8 or 12 hours I gave it a stir, or a shake.

Predictably, the first 48 hours nothing happened, except that my new pet took a trip out to my brother's house for a visit. My brother suggested we name it and we spent some time looking up deities associated with baking, brewing, and fermentation.  Silenus... Aegir... Tezcatzontecatl... ain't that a mouthful? While I got distracted watching The Amazing Race my bro carefully taped a tiny note to the tub reading "Ninkasi Mbaba" after the Sumerian and Zulu godesses.  Sure, why not? It's too cute and sweet for me to resist.  Have I mentioned this is my older brother?

Today my new pet reached the 48 hour mark, so I measured out two tablespoons of flour and 2 tablespoons of pineapple juice. The juice was cold, so I added a tablespoon of warm water to try to bring it up to temperature. 

The purpose of stirring the starter is to introduce oxygen into the mix for the yeast to be able to multiply, so I beat the mixture like eggs for omelettes. Hey, if something is worth doing, it's worth overdoing. I tucked it into the oven with the light on. Several hours later I took a peek and the lid had become distended with gas!  There still are no bubbles, but it looks like my little pet is waking up. Hopefully, next week I'll be baking my first whole wheat boule.