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SUMMARY OF WHAT YOU’LL LEARN:
- How to harvest wild yeast to make your own starter in 6 easy steps
- 8 innovative uses for sourdough starter
- A bit about its history, including how San Francisco became such a mecca for sourdough “culture” 😉
- 6 health benefits of sourdough bread
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For those who want to improve their connection with the world’s wild side, changing your diet is a smart place to start. While most of us know the appeal of making meals from garden-fresh fruits and vegetables, it’s also possible to become more self-sufficient with your baking projects by cultivating a wild sourdough starter.
This ancient, highly prized method of bread making harkens back thousands of years and takes advantage of natural fermentation to develop a starter that evolves in flavor every time you use it. With a time investment of no more than 5 minutes a day for a little over 2 weeks, you can create a wild sourdough starter with a taste and texture that’s reflective of the natural yeasts surrounding your region.
But what is sourdough bread—and how does the process work? Let’s break it down below.
What Is Sourdough Bread?
Before we dive into the details behind collecting wild yeasts, let’s look closer at the basics of sourdough bread. Put simply, it is a fermented form of dough that’s used in place of fresh yeast. You can make sourdough with a natural leaven, or a mixture of flour and water that is slowly broken down by natural enzymes and beneficial bacteria like those in the genus lactobacillus that transform the simple sugars into lactic acid.1)https://www.culturesforhealth.com/learn/sourdough/sourdough-introduction
In the right conditions, the yeast will multiply in size upward of 10 times in just 12 hours. That’s because . . . .
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