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Let’s make some Bread

One of the most magical things I can imagine is baking bread. I’m not sure what it is, but it feels incredibly grounding to me. I hope this will inspire you to try baking your own bread as well.

Dear Creatrix,

My bread baking journey began when I moved to the countryside. As I had to take my car to get to the next supermarket, I tried to go shopping only once a week.

And as I was living alone, and can only eat so much, I didn’t need a new bread every week and the days I went shopping weren’t necessarily also the days I felt like eating some fresh bread.

So I figured the best solution would be to start baking my own.

I started with bread mixes, which I bought in the supermarket, but, as this was during Corona times, they were often out, which then led me to experiment with making my own from scratch.

When I talked about this with a friend and mentioned and how happy it made me to know how to bake my own bread, but that I did still miss the sourdough breads I used to buy in Berlin – she got me a sourdough starter kit for my birthday.

I know, it was a very sweet and considerate gift.

But I had never worked with sourdough, and everything I read sounded quite complicated.

How often do you feed the starter?

What needs to be cleaned and replaced, how many times and when?

Everyone seemed to have very different and very strong opinions on everything regarding sourdough bread and I have to say, I didn’t trust myself and my judgement enough to keep using the starter that came with that first kit, and so I after a while I switched back to baking bread with yeast.

But at some point, probably because I was occasionally posting pictures of my bread, Facebook suggested a sourdough bread group to me and I joined.

Seeing those breads and reading different tips and tricks brought me to Ben Star and his video on Simple Sourdough for Lazy People.

And he also had a recipe for sourdough starter.

Usually, when we’re insecure about something (like I was about my previous sourdough starter), it’s because we don’t know enough about something.

And I think Ben Star explains everything beautifully, and so I gave myself the gift of making my own starter for Christmas.

I think in his video he suggests adding juice to the starter to get it going, but I really just used water and whole wheat rye flour, and it got going and doubled in size after a week.

My sourdough starter and I have been best friends since, and I only feed it after I use some of it, to replace what I used.

Your first sourdough starter

Ingredients:

water
flower

That’s really all you need, and a jar and some patience.

I’ll leave the explanation of how to do this best to the professional, but I if you make your first bread or want to show me your growing starter, tag me on Instagram @verenaspilker!

This is me with one of my latest breads 😉