Title: Sourdough Starter and Storing Info
Categories: Bread Primitive
Yield: 1 Starter

2	c	Flour
2	c	Lukewarm water
1	pk	Dry yeast OR
1		Cake yeast

Mix the flour, lukewarm water, and yeast thoroughly. Then set overnight away from drafts in a warm place. By the next morning, the mixture should be putting forth bubbles and a pleasant yeasty odor. This overall process needn't stop for as long as you're going to be in the wilderness, even though this may be for years.

STORING SOURDOUGH STARTER: For best results, keep the starter in a well-washed and scalded glass or pottery container. Never leave any metal in contact with it. Keep the starter as much as possible in a cool spot. As a matter of fact, if you want to store the starter or part of it for a period of months, perhaps between trips, just freeze it.

The sourdough starter can be kept fresh and clean by drying, also. If you want to carry it easily and safely, work in enough flour to solidify the spong into a dry wad. A good place to pack this is in the flour itself. When you're ready, water and warmth will reactive the yeast plants.

REVIVIFYING SOURDOUGH STARTER: Starters occasionally lose thier vigor, particularly in cold weather. Oldtimers then sometimes revive them with a tablespoon of unpasteurized cider vinegar. This puts new acetic acid bacteria on the job. A tablespoon or two of raw sour milk or cream, unpasturized buttermilk, cultured buttermilk, or cultured sour cream will get the lactic acids working again.

A sourdough starter is kept going best by the addition of flour and water only. . The starter, unless temporarily frozen or dried, should be so fed about once a week at least. If you ae regularly cooking with the starter, this process will take care of itself.

Sourdough starters should never be stored in warm places for very long. Heat-encouraged oraganisms hurtful to yeast grow at an extremely rapid rate. These soon may gain sufficient control to produce putrefactive changes, the reason for some of the unpleasant smells one occasionally runs across in old starters. Another result is that starters become progressively weaker in dough-fermenting ability.

Source: "Skills for Taming the Wilds", by Bradford Angier, 1967

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