Sourdough Saturdays

For the foreseeable future every third Saturday of the month “Sourdough Saturday”, I’ll be shooting a short video in a mystery location. First person to guess my location via commenting on my posts, wins a homemade loaf. I will even ship it to an address in the Lower Mainland. If you are an international winner, I will donate $25 to Whistler’s local food bank.

My sourdough journey started when our neighbours the McLeans introduced us to the Tartine Bread book a couple of years ago. The McLeans – Ross, Roz and their son Ben are amazing foodies. Roz was the pastry chef at Araxi for years, Ross is an electrician but really knows his way around all things food. Their son, Ben, went to school and ski raced with Abby. He’s an engineer now and paid for most of his education running a crepe stand at the Farmer’s markets in Whistler and Squamish. He was the first person out of our crew to buy the book and start baking sourdough bread. Roz followed and then me. Recently, Abby has gotten into it as well. I got my first starter from Roz, but I killed that one by accident and I’m now using one that originally came from Meg at Rising Knead Bakery. She sells at the Farmer’s markets and on-line and her bread is fantastic.

You keep a small amount of starter going by discarding some of it in your compost each morning and feeding it with a bit more flour and water. When you want to make bread you start the process the night before by adding a TBS of starter to 200 gr of water and 200 gr of flour. This becomes your Levain – the leavening agent for the bread you make the next day. The bread is only 3 ingredients; flour, water and salt. The process on the baking day does take time (7-8 hours) so this at home time has been good for honing my skills. I’ve gone through roughly 30 kgs of flour since covid started!