Feeding the Starter

I checked my teff starter today, and it seems like there has been some action.  The mixture was definitely more spongy.  It certainly smells like there has been some action.  Seriously, the thing kind of stinks.  Though, it really didn't smell so hot when I first started the thing.  Teff must just be kind of a smelly grain.

I decided to go ahead and refresh the starter.  Once fermentation has started, you need to keep feeding the yeast, by mixing more flour in.  That way the yeast is nourished and will multiply until they are strong enough to ferment a bread dough.  Apparently, this can take several weeks.  There's not really any way to know how often I will have to refresh the starter, but as the yeast multiply, the starter will get stronger and faster-acting.

To refresh the starter, I used brown rice flour.  I wanted to get away from the teff, since when I do turn this into bread it will probably be mostly rice flour.  I simply mixed the brown rice flour with water, and stirred in the teff starter:

A refreshed teff starter

I made this a little wetter than my original starter, which had gotten pretty crusty after a few days.  Hopefully this will keep it from crusting as much.

I also got two more starters going with two different whole grain gluten free flours: millet and sorghum.

These joined the other under a dish towel on top of my refrigerator.

I should probably mention that I haven't purchased anything for this project yet, because my kitchen cabinet looks like this:

No News Yet

Peeked at the starter today.  I think it's getting a little spongy, maybe?  It's hard to tell.  It crusted on top a little, so I switched the cheese cloth out for a dish towel.  That should hold in the moisture a little better.

On Thursday I'm going to make a few more starters, so that I have some different things going, in case the one I've started goes horrible wrong.  I'll update with the details then.

Natural Starter

One of the things that makes some artisan breads so interesting and complex is that they use a natural yeast starter.

Let's back-up for a second and do a little Yeast 101:  Yeast is a microscopic organism that acts on sugars and changes them in carbon dioxide gas and alcohol.  It is the release of gas that causes the leavening of bread.  You can purchase commercial produced yeast, but yeast is all around us, all the time.  It is possible to use wild yeast to leaven bread.  This is done, at the most basic level, by mixing flour with water and letting it sit for several days.

It is recommended, when you make a starter, to use whole grain rye.  Rye is a good environment for wild yeast, so starters made will whole grain rye (the yeast live on the outside of the grain) are more likely to be successful.  I, however, wanted to make a gluten free starter, and rye has gluten, of course!  I decided to go with teff flour.  Teff is the grain that is used in an Ethiopian flat bread called injera.  While some recipes have you add yeast, traditionally it is just left to ferment on it's own, so I figured teff must be a good source of wild yeast.

All I did was mix teff flour with water until it had made kind of a dough.

I decided to just cover it with cheese cloth, so nothing creepy would fall in, but all my yeasty friends would feel welcome to come in and cozy up.

Come on in, my little friends.  I have simple sugars for you!

Hopefully, in a couple days, this will start to get bubbly.  Check back in a few days!

My Life as a Gluten Intolerant Baker

After I graduated culinary school, I decided I wanted to go back to cake decorating, something I had done a bit before school.  I eventually ended up working as a cake decorator at Whole Foods.  During my time there I also ended up doing quite a bit of baking and production.  I had worked there a few years, honing my skills as a baker, before I got the news:  I'm gluten intolerant.

It fucking sucked.

Food is a huge part of my life.  I eat out... A LOT.  And I don't mean fast food or shitty chains.  I live in Portland Oregon, one of the greatest food cities in the country.  I was eating artisan breads, dim sum, wood fired pizza, and hand made pasta.  I had just found out that I could never again eat the majority of what I had been consuming.  I cried for most of that day.

I now spent five days a week making baked goods that I couldn't consume.  Suddenly, working in a bakery was far less rewarding.  I stayed at Whole Foods for at least another year before I found a job managing a gluten free bakery.  I no longer work there.  I now have a collection of small jobs.  In addition to helping out at three different small bakery operations, I teach a baking class at a community college.

So, this is my life now: teaching how to make baked goods that I can't eat.

I've been gluten free for several years now.  You would think, as a baker, I would have set to work creating delicious gluten free baked goods right away, but I really haven't done much gluten free baking.  It actually wasn't until I started teaching this class that I really got motivated.  I try to teach the science behind baking in my class, so I had to brush up on all the different aspects of baking.  Gluten development is one of the most important things to understand when you are baking, and studying up on the characteristics of gluten really helped me understand the challenges that you face when trying to make things gluten free.

Last week I taught a class on artisan breads.  I hadn't made bread since culinary school, and really didn't remember much about it.  So the day of class, I'm sitting in my office reading the textbook, thinking "oooh.  I didn't know that.  How interesting!" about things that I'm supposed to be teaching in a few hours.  Relax; it's just community college.  Anyway, I'm learning all about natural yeast starters, and it's pretty cool stuff.  I started to wonder if it was something I could pull off gluten free. 

So today, on a whim, I threw together a starter.  Since I'm sure this will be a long process of experimentation, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who has wanted a gluten free sourdough bread, I thought I should document it with a blog.

Hey, why not, right?