Eating The Healthy Way – Making My Own Sourdough Starter & Bread

Day 1 ===> Simple Ingredients To Make A Sourdough Starter – Pineapple Juice, Wholemeal Flour (click on picture to enlarge)

My first sourdough bread – not very pretty but extremely tasty

Hi there, dear friends

I have been baking bread on and off for the past 12 years – I got a bread machine as a farewell gift from my colleagues when I retired from the corporate world. I just love the aroma of freshly baked breads wafting through my home, especially if I set a timer to the bread machine to start kneading the bread at 4am and I wake up to the smell of bread!

However, my bread making skills are not very good – I can only make simple breads (white or wholemeal) and burger buns – it was easier to just buy the bread for my family …

Recently, my husband has been asking me many times to make sourdough bread but I have been putting off learning how to make the starter because it seemed like a long and tedious process to me.

But after reading about the health benefits of eating sourdough bread, and how the sourdough starter can be used to make delicious waffles, pancakes, pretzels, pizzas, flatbread and muffins, too, I was all set to finally make my very first sourdough starter and bread.

There are so many recipes for making the starter on the Internet and it took me many days of thorough reading before I finally settled on one which I felt comfortable with and that I liked the most – from Pinch My Salt website - instructions and illustrations were well provided, sufficient to give me the courage to take the first step finally to make some sourdough bread for my family. Another reason why I went for her recipe was because of the use of pineapple juice, instead of water, because I love pineapple juice and fruit!

The picture above shows Day 1 of my “Sourdough Bread Adventure” – it was super easy…just add 1 cup of wholemeal flour (I used organic stoneground wholemeal flour) to 3/4 cup of pineapple juice, mix well and put into a clean jar.

Mark the level of the starter with a rubber band (to see if the starter has grown) and cover the jar with a piece of paper kitchen towel, fastened with another rubber band.

Today was Day 2 when I fed my sourdough starter with 1 cup of bread flour and half cup of pineapple juice. I realised today that my jar should be larger to accommodate the starter as I feed it daily…and I moved it to a larger jar.

It’s been 36 hours since I made my sourdough starter….just now, I could see the starter growing about 1/2 an inch above the rubber band level. Wow, am I happy that my starter seems to be on the right track. Hopefully, by next week, I would be able to make my first sourdough bread!

I found some informative articles on the health benefits of eating sourdough bread ===>