Stella the Starter

Making sourdough is a journey. You plan, you visualize, you make investments, you have great expectations. Sometimes there are impressive outcomes and sometimes things go terribly wrong. I have made countless loaves of sourdough. Many of them have been wonderful. Others have been disappointing. But after much research, frustration, trial, and failure, I have started to climb my way toward success.

Things started to improve when I got to know my starter. Her name is Stella, and she lives in a pickle jar in my refrigerator.

Stella is an effervescent diva. When she is well fed and taken care of, she puffs up and expands to two or three times her size. When she’s hungry and tired, she sinks down to the bottom of her jar and gets a bit mopey while she waits for her next meal. I feed her when I want a loaf, and she rewards me with an incredibly satisfying, hearty boule with a complex, tangy flavor that needs nothing more than a smear of butter.

I’ll use this space to document many of the lessons that Stella has taught me in my journey to making sourdough bread. Perhaps the most important one is patience. But let’s start with a PowerPoint that I developed to document the process that finally started to pay off.