Fluffy, Our New Pet!

During the frenzied cooking fit Kris had while the blizzard was going on the other day, she made a sourdough starter. We have been bumping into recipe's using sourdough starters in a couple of our cook books and threatening to make one but never did. We have kids in Alaska and although sourdough starters have been around thousands of years, Alaska's gold rush seems to have been fueled by sourdough flapjacks and biscuits. Making a sourdough starter seems supportive of the adventure the kids are having in Alaska.

So, during the swirl of wind and snow a new sourdough starter was made. We had a recipe from a cowboy cookbook and Kris used this. When I came in from one of my trips out to blow the road, Kris had me peek in a small crock. I knew what the frothy mixture must be right away. "Cool, when can we use it?" I asked.
"Oh, it said 2-4 days, after it reaches the desired sourness," she replied.

Hmmm, desired sourness. Evidently, there are degrees of sourness. I decided to look up sourdough starters on line. I wanted to make bread with it and had no idea how much of this stuff to use. The flap jack recipe had called for a couple of cups of it which seemed like a lot. The second web site I looked at had all the information you could want on sourdough starter and how to use it. The author spoke with a relaxed, imprecise manner that comes from years of experience. I make my bread that way and his advice seemed to fit right in.

Well, sourdough starters are wild yeasts. Millions of little organisims that live in colonies and kind of make a collective glob that can be thought of as one organism. It needs regular feeding and can't get too warm. Other than that, it is hard to kill. Even if you don't feed it, it probably isn't going to die. They are simple to make and have been used for thousands of years and some are hundreds of years old.

I was reading the information to Kris. The blizzard was still going on so she was still a blur of cooking activity. At one point the author said he like to think of his starter as a pet that lives in the fridge. Kris stopped cooking, looked over and smiled. A new pet. We had a new pet. "What are going to call it?" she asked. I called to mind the bubbly froth and its intended use. "Fluffy?" I looked at her with raised eyebrows. Oh, yes, Fluffy has taken up residence in the fridge at Missed Skeet Farm.

I looked over at the small crock on the shelf of the wood stove where Fluffy was incubating. Fluffy had out grown her first crock and was oozing down the shelf and dripping on the cooktop. A frantic search and we came up with a bigger crock and put fluffy in that. I went back to reading. Hours before you are going to make bread with your starter, you make a sponge. Sponges are flour and water and your starter-usually all of your starter, in this case, Fluffy. This sits and percolates and then you use this just as you would regular yeast only lots of it. While Fluffy is out of her jar, you clean it and then take some of this blob and put it back into the jar and return it to the fridge. Fluffy will wait patiently until you need her again.

Cooking with Fluffy appeals to me for a bunch of reasons. First, it would make a great TV show-Cooking with Fluffy. "Lets punch it up a notch." Second, cooking with an amorphous blob you don't measure is irresistable, and finally, we have a new pet-- Fluffy, the wild yeast, able to blow up loaves of bread with a single blob!