Sometimes you want to slow right down. That’s half the fun of making your own food, growing your own veg, making clothes or keeping chickens, where you have to wait for the eggs to arrive, rather than running to the shop and picking them up.

I’ve decided to apply this philosophy to bread.

We both eat a lot of bread, making several rounds of sandwiches for our workday lunches, and toast for our eggs and the weekends. So I’m going to start making our own. Rather than regular bread, though, I’m going to try sourdough bread, which requires a bit of time and patience.

To start with, you have to grow the starter culture that will make it rise.

Everyone’s starter will be unique, as it is affected by the air in your house, the chemicals in your water supply and what kind of flour you use. Once you have got it going, though, it is a living organism that you need to look after and feed and, if you do, you could keep it alive for months, years or, if you were to live long enough, centuries, as it keeps renewing itself.

Today is stage one, then. I’ve mixed a cup of plain flour with a cup of warm water in an old sweetener jar, mixed them well and am leaving them to stand. Tomorrow I’ll remove half of the mixture and replace it with more flour and water to feed the naturally-occurring yeasts that will be starting to form.

This will go on for a week or so until, if it all works, about this time next week it’ll be time to start baking our first loaf.

Check back to see how we get on.

Related posts:

1. Our sourdough starter is maturing
2. Success with the sourdough bread
3. Mixed results from the sourdough mix