R.I.P. Sourdough

In a sad turn of events, I walked into my kitchen this morning to find my fledgling sourdough starter overtaken by little flies. Or worse, perhaps baby cockroaches. I am now terrified of insect infestation, not to mention a little disappointed that my two-week old starter is dead and gone. I know it was my fault... I didn't feed it enough, I left it alone for too long, leaving it vulnerable to attack by outside forces. My poor malnourished starter, may you find peace at last in my garbage disposal.

It kind of sounds like I've committed infanticide, but let me tell you a little about sourdough so I don't seem so murderous. The basis of any good bread, as we all know, is yeast. And as we are also aware, yeast comes in little envelopes, looking like big grainy sand. In culinary school, I learned all my baking with fresh yeast, which comes in logs that look and feel like clay and are more fun to play with than the dry stuff. These are both commercially available forms of our favorite unicellular fungus friend.

Though some people are weirded out, or even mystified, by the idea of using a wee fungus to make their bread, yeast is actually very easy to understand. They are very hearty creatures that can survive almost anything you throw at them. Feed them a little sugar (likely in the form of flour, carbohydrates abound) and a little water, and they go to work for you. They eat this sugar and excrete two lovely things: Carbon Dioxide, and alcohol. And these two by-products explain two of our favorite things to consume-- bread and beer. When it comes to beer, the yeast feed on the barley mash and produce alcohol, a distinctive flavor, and the CO2 bubbles that make beer so delightfully fizzy. Bread works in just the same way, only it's not quite so obvious. The alcohol is still there-- hence the wonderfully fermented "beer-y" smell of rising dough-- but it burns off and evaporates during the baking process. The bubbles are still there too. They cause the dough to rise, and finally when the bread is baked, the starches of the dough gelatinize, containing these bubbles of air inside a web-work of bready goodness.

What we call "quick breads" use something other than yeast for leavening-- usually baking soda or powder. That's why a muffin has a dense, crumbly texture: there's no yeast to produce those big gas bubbles. And sourdough is a completely different story altogether.

To make sourdough you still need yeast, but how to get that irresistible complexity of flavor? For that, you need bacteria, and in that case, a package of yeast isn't gonna cut it. Wild yeast is floating everywhere at all times, and a sourdough starter is a way of catching that yeast and putting it to work. All you need is some flour and some water. If you leave it out long enough, the critters will come. The difference between a starter and the little package of yeast in warm water is that while the yeast develops and multiplies in the paste of flour and water, so do bacteria. The good kind! The yeast feeds and breeds, excreting CO2 and alcohol all the while. Ideally, the alcohol kills off all the nasty bacteria, and what's left is the secret to sourdough. The bacteria release acids, most importantly lactic acid, and the result is a sour, creamy, complex, yeasty sweet flavor that you can't get anywhere else.

The problem is, to achieve this all the conditions have to be carefully controlled. You have to refresh the starter regularly with more flour and warm water, and eventually refrigerate it if you're not going to use it every day. That's where I went wrong. I became lazy, let my starter starve for too many hours, didn't stir it enough... It could be anything, really. Eventually what must have happened is the yeast colony perished, stopped defending against intruders like bad bacteria (ie. spoilage,) and let the 2-quart container get stormed by bugs. A tragic conclusion to a too-short life. Sigh.

After unceremoniously dumping the dead starter, I took a look around my kitchen and noticed that it's filthy. Damn it. Now this is what I gotta spend my day doing? My sink stinks, my fridge stinks, the stove is crusty and I blame my boyfriend. Sorry Marty! I even experienced a brief jolt of terror when I saw what I thought were mouse droppings on the counter. I think they're chocolate sprinkles though so I'm better now. Anyway, I did clean the kitchen really well just a few.. weeks ago... augh, the pointlessness of it all.

Oh, and if I do have mice, the fact that I have a huge cat is of no consequence whatsoever. She's not the hunting type. It would sort of be like asking me to take a look under the hood and fix an engine. We don't really get our paws dirty like that.