This may look like a jail sentence for my sourdough starter, but I assure you, it is quite happy.  The story of my starter began as a tale of woe, but after a much needed boost of productive starter from a friend, we were on our way.

Friends warned me that I should not expect my sourdough bread to actually taste like real San Francisco sourdough bread.  I kept that in the back of my mind, but I secretly hoped that the flavor would at least bear some resemblance.  Many attempts later I can say with confidence that I was wrong, and everyone else was right.

I began coddling my starter in mid-December.  I should have known this was a fool’s errand in mid-December given the fact that my apartment is almost always colder inside than it is outside.  This makes for bearable summer-time conditions, but during the winter I end up having to sleep with a hat and 2 layers on.  Ridiculous, I know.  (Yes, I have a heater, but it’s just a wall heater in an inconvenient location in my house.)  To be expected, my starter hated the North Pole-like conditions in my apartment just as much as I did.  Nonetheless, I kept adding flour to it, and just for good measure I took a dual-pronged attack by cultivating two starters – a whole wheat flour and a white flour starter.  For a good 2 weeks I was caught in a frenzy of fretting over the lack of activity in my starters and the need to keep feeding it as my only way to cope.  This led to creating a Jabba the Hut size amount of starter and the consumption of a LOT of flour, but with no bubbling action going on.  A whole rack of my refrigerator had been taken over, in fact.  Things were out of control.  I even tried to warm up the starter by putting it under a heating blanket.  I probably even sang to it at one point.

And then, my friend gave me some of his starter and lent me The Bread Baker’s Apprentice by Peter Reinhart.  Us baker’s north of San Francisco have to hope that whatever yeasty particles that are naturally floating in the air actually make it into our starter, and that isn’t much.  To fix this, Reinhart says to mix in pineapple juice in the starter.  Brilliant – it worked.  Since then, I have been able to dump most of the original starter and just coddle this one bowl.

Today I pulled out some starter from my refrigerator and have started to build it up until I have 2/3 cup for this recipe taken from The Bread Baker’s Apprentice.  It’s still a bit chilly in my apartment so I haven’t quite yet abandoned the need to use a heating blanket, but at least my starter is happy.

It's toasty in here!