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.