Well, this will be my last post in the Build Your Own Sourdough Mother project. If you have played along, please send me photos of your babies for the Hall of Fame, if you are having issues you can either message me here or in my instagram feed if you need help, I will help if I can.
Let’s check in on that young one one last time, shall we?
Now that’s just showing off! And serves me right for filling her full of quinoa flour and water right before bed. Note to self, anything over half the jar I am going to be cleaning the bench.
So, you have a bouncing baby sourdough mother. Be she grain free, gluten free or regular, and I know we have a few different combinations playing along, she will need care moving forward.
For me, I mostly feed mine twice a day, how much depends on how much is in the jar, whether I am planning to make bread tomorrow, whether I am discarding or building up..... Never forget, we are dealing with a living creature here, a breathing, burping, eating, farting thing that relies on us to give her what she needs to survive.
So, if I am not planning to make bread tomorrow, each morning I tip away most of the bulk, about 3/4, it never goes to waste, I either make it into crackers or crumpets or I just cook it like a pancake for my chickens, who absolutely love it, like, literally, tip it straight into an oiled frying pan like a big pancake, cook one side, flip, cook the other side, cool and out to the chooks (don’t be tempted to eat it, it is YUK!), then I add 30g warm water and 20-30g my flour of choice, I wipe the brim where I poured her with a clean paper towel, give her a good stir with my scalded and cooled spoon, pop her lid back on, into the corner. In the evening I feed her the same amount again, and so it goes. Every couple of days I change her pyjamas, anytime she is looking manky, which with my enthusiasts seems to be about every two days, never forget to scald and cool the jars, we do not want pathogens. This is your holding pattern, if that is too much for you to manage, you can double the mix and feed her once a day, just make the batter a little heavier, so slightly more flour to water so she has something to keep her going, I would say 60g flour, 60g water, but that will depend on your flour. As I have said before, this little one is fed on quinoa flour or buckwheat flour or a mixture of the two, quinoa flour provides her with fast energy, much like carbs do for us, buckwheat flour takes her a while longer to get through, so is better for night feeds.
If I am making bread the next day I need to make sure I have enough mother to cover my recipe. My own grain free sourdough bread recipe takes 200g of mother to make a loaf, so the day before, I feed 50g flour, 50-60g water in the morning, same again at night. If you are only feeding once a day you will need to double this. Please bear in mind, we want to use this mother while we is active, not asleep having depleted all your feed stores, so if you are only feeding once a day, a light snack the night before, or even a few hours before, you plan to use her will have her all warmed up and at her chatty best.
With this photo, I decided I wanted to make two loaves so I had fed her 100 g flour/ 100g water twice yesterday so I had 400g mother plus enough left over to feed up again, and look at the mess she made! Little grub, there was enough, just, but a lesson to me, maybe just a little less in the jar from now on, I figure there was about 500g of mother in there all up.
So what if you get sick of feeding her for a while, or you want a break? Nothing easier, just pop her in the fridge, she will go to sleep and you can have a rest. She will separate and look pretty ordinary, but so long as she does not start growing her own hair she will be okay. She will most likely look like a pile of grey sludge under brown fluid. When you want to wake her up, just take her out of the fridge, scoop a couple of spoonfuls of the grey sludge from the bottom of the jar into a fresh scalded and cooled jar, give her a small feed, leave her on the bench, repeat again that night, within a day or two she should have woken up and off you two go into the sunset together again.
So there we go, I hope you enjoyed this as much as I did. There are many, many sourdough bread recipes out there, my own, for grain free sourdough, here, let me show you a pic (proud mama that I am) -
will be available next year as I am working on a couple of recipe books that will released initially as e-books. I am pondering doing up a gluten free basic sourdough bread though for this blog, so let me know either in the comments or by messaging me in the instagram whether this is something anyone would be interested in, if I get enough interest I will make one and put it here for those of you who have followed this project and have your own burping babies on the bench.
If you have successfully made your own mother, well done, congratulations! If it has not worked send me a message and we will get our heads together and try to figure out why.
Have a great day, xxm.