seeing bread
MAKING A BASIC STARTER
You can’t make sourdough bread without a starter, and starters inevitably take a few days to come to life. This delay seems to deter many aspiring first-time bakers, but it shouldn’t. Once you’ve got a starter up and running, you can keep it in hibernation in the fridge, then bake at your own convenience. So, let’s get started!
What is a starter?
A starter is a living thing – or more precisely, a collection of several billion living things, swimming in a mixture of their food and their by-products. Yeast is the star of the show: a single-celled fungus that eats carbohydrates (sugars and starches) and turns them into carbon dioxide gas and alcohol. (Unbaked dough is slightly alcoholic, but bread isn’t, as the alcohol is driven out of the loaf by the high temperature of the oven.) Cohabiting with these busily eating (and farting) yeast cells is
