Re sourdough: with two (2) adult humans in the house, I started baking a loaf every 10 days or so last fall, and it's doubled to every 5 days or so since we've both been staying home. I also often throw some starter into a batch of pancakes or the like in between batches of bread. The starter is definitely happier being used more frequently: at 10 days it was spending the majority of its time in the fridge, while now I leave it out on the counter most of the time. I find it takes about 36 hours from initial mixing to having a complete, baked loaf, and that suits the current pace of my life.
Of course, that's a mostly-liquid-style starter, fed with equal parts (by mass) of flour and water. I gather San Francisco style is more typically a hard ball that one breaks open to extract the soft, active core and discard the rind; I tried that approach years ago and was never terribly successful at it.
BTW, have you read the novel Sourdough, by Robin Sloan? The two protagonists are a software engineer at a Silicon Valley robotics start-up and her semi-sentient sourdough culture. The plot gets amusingly surreal, with hints of "Little Shop of Horrors" and excursions to comment on other aspects of Bay Area [human] culture.
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Date: 2020-05-06 10:32 am (UTC)Of course, that's a mostly-liquid-style starter, fed with equal parts (by mass) of flour and water. I gather San Francisco style is more typically a hard ball that one breaks open to extract the soft, active core and discard the rind; I tried that approach years ago and was never terribly successful at it.
BTW, have you read the novel Sourdough, by Robin Sloan? The two protagonists are a software engineer at a Silicon Valley robotics start-up and her semi-sentient sourdough culture. The plot gets amusingly surreal, with hints of "Little Shop of Horrors" and excursions to comment on other aspects of Bay Area [human] culture.