Sourdough Update
It’s now day 2 of “triple feeding.” Like I said before, this involves throwing out all but two cups of the maturing starter each morning. To that, you add 1 cup water and 1¼ cups flour. Later in the day, 4-6 hours (closer to 8 for me), you add 2 cups water and 2½ cups flour, Finally, just before bedtime, it’s 4 cups water (I’m using bottled water) and 5 cups flour. A lot of shit gets thrown away over 5 days of feeding like this, but there is method to the madness.
You’d need a truckload of flour to maintain this exponential addition of ingredients if you didn’t start over each day. You’d be adding 40 cups of flours by the end of the second day, 320 by the third, 2560 on the fourth, and 20480 on the final day – not to mention all the incremental additions in between. Better to throw most the shit away.
“So, why exponential addition of flour?” I hear you thinking. The answer occurred to me while I was adding flour this morning. You are training the yeast to be fast-acting by natural selection. Some of the yeast cells are genetically disposed to grow a little faster than the others. By supplying enough food for them to consume double the amount of flours every 8 hours or so, you are removing all constraints on their growth. The yeast cells that multiply more slowly also have all constraints removed, but at the end of the day there will be fewer of them, relatively, so the concentration of fast-acting yeast will be higher. Throwing away all but two cups each morning effectively culls “the herd.”
“So what the fuck does that have to do with that picture of the Clabber Girl? I hear you thinking. Nothing, I say, except that the sourdough kinda reminds me of clabbered cream. Since that is cream that has basically spoiled, I wondered why that Baking Soda chose a young lady they chose to name “Clabber Girl” as their symbol. Did she smell funny? Then I looked for recipes for clabbered cream, which might not be that much different from crème fraiche, who knows, but I didn’t find anything mentioned but bonnyclabber and not even a single recipe for that – just a description in several dictionaries: “Thick, soured milk eaten with cream and sugar, honey, or molasses.” Well, maybe it’s better that all the recipes stay lost.
5:05:43 PM 
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