I Made a Sourdough Starter Like They Did 100 Years Ago — No Measuring, No Recipe

Homestead kitchens are a busy place; full of preserving the harvest (meat or garden), processing foraged wild food, making medicine, and feeding bellies with simple, from the land ingredients. You make do with what you have, it doesn't have to be perfect- just homemade.

One thing we keep on our counter along with jars of lacto-fermenting foods and medicine, is a sourdough starter.

A starter allows you to bake bread without depending on the store for commercial yeast, which is a handy thing in the bush. It also is a low glycemic, easier to digest way to make bread, more like what folks were baking with 100 years ago. It also can be passed down from generation to generation.

This week we shared how to make your own, with a simple no fuss method. We took that same starter and baked a loaf of homemade sourdough bread with it in a week with our frontier sourdough recipe, which we shared too!

Til next week in the kitchen,
-Dennis, Amy & Lena

HOMESTEAD RECIPES

FRONTIER SOURDOUGH STARTER

quart mason
1/4-1/2 C flour
1/4-1/2 C water, or sightly less

Combine flour and water in a quart mason. Cap lightly. Repeat everyday for 5 days, then feed 2x a day for another 2.

Put starter in fridge to slow down or feed less often, if you wish.

FRONTIER SOURDOUGH
1/2 C active starter
2 C water
1 tbsp salt
4 C flour

1. Combine water, starter, mix well. Add salt and mix in. Add flour and mix until a shaggy dough forms. Sit 1.5 hrs.
2. Do 3-4 stretch and folds, 30 min apart. et sit another 3-7 hours. Or more, if you are busy!
3. Shape, put in a parchment lined bowl. Let sit 1.5 hrs.
4. Preheat oven to 450, with dutch oven inside. Bake loaf 20 min with the lid on, and 20 min with it off.