Have a little Faith...

So today, my littlest girl is ready to spring into action...no not Jez, she has been in service for quite a while as anyone who knows her will tell you.  Faith, the starter.  Thought it might be fun to geek out a touch and talk about some bread dynamics.

Bubbly goodness

Faith is what is known as a liquid levain or in English, a sourdough starter.  The only problem is that in the French style, she probably wont make sour bread... so really she is a levain.  Long ago before Louis Pasteur isolated yeast, bakers had only a few options to make bread rise.  The principal plan was to make a living culture out of flour and water and wild yeasts.  Normally made by mixing flour, water, and some fruit or other natural sugar containing thing (grapes are nice, ours used pomegranate seeds) and allowing it to sit for a while.  If you feed it flour and water every day, eventually the wild yeasts will have a chance to colonize and you will have a stable culture.  It, romantically speaking, really helps if you do this by the light of the full moon and stir with a silver rod.

Now, there are some pros and cons with this method.
Pros: when properly executed, a levain will create amazing truly idiosyncratic breads.  They will not only taste of the place (Provence, Seattle, etc) but also the direct environment (my family etc)
Cons: The starter is not only alive, but REALLY idiosyncratic in its own right.  It needs to be fed the same amount every day at the same time, maintained in the same temperature and humidity, and oh yeah... it needs to be fed.  Everyday.  And it could die. and that would suck.  And if you don't do it perfect, it makes really crappy bread.

Grahl

However, being that there were no cute little packets of yeast, this was pretty much the only way to make bread.  The only other option was a magic wand like our boy Grahl... but that is a different story.

So the nitty gritty: you have two basic kinds of levains: liquid and firm.  A liquid levain (like Faith) is 100% hydrated, meaning that the flour and water are in equal proportions by weight.  (We can discuss baker's math some other time).  Liquid levains tend to make lactic acid... which means that the bread is complex but not tangy.
A firm levain is where water equals about 60% of the flour weight.  It looks like a dough, but it isn't kneaded.  Firm levains tend towards acetic acid production, i.e. the breads that you make with them will be tangy.

However temperature plays a role as well.  There are cute little buggers in levains called lacto baccili and they are either heterofermenting or homofermenting.  Homofermenting only produce 1 thing, either acetic acid or lactic.  The hetero kats can bat for both teams and will make either acetic acid or lactic acid depending on the ambient temperature.... make sense?  So if we keep our levain at room temp, it will make lactic, if we refrigerate it, it will produce acetic.

So for a true San Fransisco sourdough, keep it firm and put it in the fridge.  For a complex European style bread, liquid and room temp levain is the way to go.

Ok, enough geekin out.  So Faith is liquid and room temp, just the way I like it.  Fluid and dynamic even.  The thing I like most about working with wild yeasts is that it takes Faith.  You have no control.  It's like kids, you can put them in the perfect environment, you can feed them the best things and... sometimes they will surprise you completely.  Kids and Yeast cultures... perfect recipe against taking things for granted.  They scream: Be Here Now.  Or else I will do something crazy.

Have a little Faith... you can do it.  If anyone wants a proper recipe, let me know. I plan to bake tomorrow.  Cross your fingers, she is only 10 days old...