Love Gone Sour

When Lady Gaga wrote “Bad Romance,” it must have been in the throws of trying to make a sourdough starter – that delightful little piece of magic dough that gives loaves of sourdough bread their wonderfully tart taste.

After all, a starter flirts…it promises…it excites and enthralls…then it unexpectedly leaves you.  You remain: cruelly disappointed and wondering what you did wrong.

 

Yet even the brokenhearted ultimately try to love again.  

I like to think that the silver lining behind all of my false starts is that, every time I failed to get a little something going, I at least developed a clearer sense of what might work better next time.  Now, after months (MONTHS) of trial and error, I finally (FINALLY!) have viable starters going.  No matter which recipe you use (a Google search will yield dozens), here's what I found helped put the magic into my relationships with these little balls of dough...

The magic of diastatic malt powder:  obvious 
activity on day 3 of a developing starter

1. The steroid for starters:  diastatic malt powder.  For me, this was the solution for levains that never seemed to activate.  After reading about it in Reinhart’s Whole Grain Breads, I ordered some online from King Arthur Flour and put a half teaspoon or so into new starters during the first phase Since then, the starters have clearly demonstrated the level of activity I expected, when I expected it. 
2. To cover or not to cover.  There seems to be two schools of thought here, but I found that leaving the starter on my countertop with a piece of plastic wrap lying loosely over the bowl worked best – by far.  Even once a completed mother starter was covered tightly to go into the fridge, venting it once after the first hour or two to release any carbon dioxide seemed to be important.  I imagine those poor, oxygen-starved yeast and bacteria suffocating in carbon dioxide.  I don’t know if that’s what happens, but that’s what I picture.
3.  Stir, stir, stir.  Literally – during each phase of development, stirring my mixture three times a day made a difference between a developing starter that demonstrated the activity I expected and something that seemed to be giving me the cold shoulder.

In the end, what each of these little tricks helped me solve for is my hideous lack of patience.  Maybe my past starters would have worked had I given them more time.  But I’m not a patient woman.  I need BIG, explosive signs that my love is appreciated and reciprocated.  I never was one to sit by the phone waiting for him to call me.  Clearly, nothing’s changed.