The swimming pool of sourdough bread starter.

I was recently given sourdough bread starter by an avid and expert bread baker in central Minnesota, along with recipes and tips, for which I am still extremely grateful. Happily knowing I was much closer to meeting one of my goals of making “sourdough bread,” I brought the starter home to my abode, where it dormantly (and yes, I know that dormantly is not typically used as an adverb) sat in my fridge awaiting the time when I would have a chance to revive it. The actually process is termed 'reactivation' by my recipe but ‘revive’ seemed slightly more descript.

Finally after several weeks/weekends of running around spending time with family and friends, I recognized that I was going to have the time to invest into the starter and the resulting bread. You see, after having the starter sit in my fridge for so long, it requires at least three good days of feeding (four times a day, mind you) prior to being able to be used for baking.

Day 1: After studying the directions for several minutes, I felt slightly intimidated by the process and wondered what exactly I had gotten myself into, especially when I read the warning: “but each day, before you begin, pour off all but 1 pound 2 ounces (about two cups) of starter.  (If you kept doubling the amount of starter during each feeding, you’d eventually have enough starter to fill a swimming pool.” Yikes. So I followed the directions explicitly, but I was nervous that I would somehow wreck my starter and/or have a disastrous mess.

Yet, onward I continued. Brief capping of events:

1) Flour, water, starter, stir, set aside.

2) 6 hours later: flour, water, starter, stir, set aside.

3) 6 hours later: flour, water, starter, stir, set aside.

4) 8 hours later: keep only two cups of starter. Repeat step one.

With the left over starter, I immediately felt utter guilt with the thought of throwing it out. So I pushed aside my dreams of soup on this bitterly cold night and made sourdough pancakes (a recipe that had been wisely given to me with the starter). The pancakes were pretty spectacular. However, I couldn’t just make a single batch of pancakes, as I had so much starter to rescue from the fate of the trash or toilet. Instead, I made about 1108 pancakes. (Well, not really, but it seemed like that many, as I was cooking them.) Then, even after making all those pancakes (which are currently living in my freezer), I still had a significant amount of starter left.

I had been warned by my mom and some friends that sourdough starter becomes a lot like “friendship bread starter,” which my dear friend Emily and I made until we were crazy, a couple years ago. At that crazy point, she and I got wise and just threw it away, but we kept our crazy. However, I was not prepared for the volume the starter. Not at all.

Yet, I could not bring myself to throw the starter away, and instead, I loaded the remaining starter into a bucket for fridge dormancy, just in case my worst fears come to light, and I need to start over. But, I’m guessing I will not need to start over, as less than 50 minutes after completing step four, the starter was so happy, it blew the lid off (behold, the power of yeast), and made me jump a square kitchen tile. Still, I just could not bring myself to throwing the other starter away. 

At the rate I’m currently going, I will have a swimming pool of starter; the only thing lacking is, well, a swimming pool. Will there be another million pancakes tomorrow? 

A mere fraction of my plate sized pancakes...