If you want your yeast to have a distinctive regional flavor, then definitely go the wild yeast capturing route … this is in fact the reason why San Francisco sourdough tastes different from say New York or Chicago … the yeast used are regional.

A further note, while there is definitely yeast in flour (there’s actually yeast in everything, just about), when you make a yeast starter with just flour and water you are mostly getting your yeast from the air. And also, there isn’t a ‘proper’ sourdough yeast per-se. Sourdough gets its tangy flavor from the fermentation process the starter is allowed to go through. Each strain of yeast (and there are more that 1500) imparts its own signature as well. You can get strains of yeast to make your sourdough taste like, for instance, San Francisco sourdough … but it isn’t a ‘sourdough’ yeast so much as the strain of yeast used by most San Francisco sourdough makers.

If you store it near a boiler or something like that, then cover it with a cloth to keep things from falling into it.

Ciao!

Thanks for the pointer to egullet. I didn’t find that when I was
looking for information.

Shame on you for being mean, though.

You are right about the baking soda. I thought I had removed that
when I rewrote the article.

The history of the article:

* I got the original recipe from a friend who had hand copied it from a county cook book. The recipe worked and produced decent bread.
* I put it on my web site.
* The recipe somehow made it up to the first page of results on Google. I don’t know what happened, it must have been linked to.
* I updated my site and the recipe was removed.
* I still got hits for the (now missing) page.
* After about a year and a half of that, I updated my site again.
* Since the original recipe, I have made beer and spent a bit more time with yeasty-beasties. So I updated the recipe, though out some bogus parts, rewrote it in my own style and re-posted it.

I have never heard that flour has yeasts in it. It makes sense.
Yeasts are everywhere. Our old house has nasty things that taste
awful. However, I would think that the processes that flour goes
though would kill the yeasts.

I haven’t been able to experiment much, since my current house isn’t
very temperature controlled and has a teeny tiny kitchen.

Ciao!

The bit about baking soda being the sour part is particularly funny since it’s quite the opposite. Feeding a sourdough with anything but flour is a recipe for really bad bread.

A proper sourdough starter should never have anything in it but flour and water. Nothing else is required. Flour has natural sourdough yeasts and the bacteria required to generate the lactic acid required for the sour taste. Adding store bought yeast just forces all the yeast you want to compete with the natural yeasts, this is very wrong on so many levels. The link above will steer you straight.

Never heard of such a thing as using potato flakes. But a starch is a starch.

The rules above are about the care of the yeast organism. If you use potato flakes you would only be changing the food. I don’t know how much change it’ll make in the starter and how much change it’d make in the bread you make.

It would be interesting to try. I don’t know if you could totally replace the flour or not. You’d have to make sure that the flakes are only potato and not something that’ll kill the yeasts.

You could start with the recipe above but when you go to add more flour, use flakes instead. If the yeast continues, then you have success!

Ciao!