"Happy Birthday, dear Sourdough Starter ...."

sourdough loaves
Aug. 18, 2019

This is the month that my sourdough starter turns thirty-three years old.

It was in August 1986 that my son (who had just turned 14) and I flew off to Alaska to check out some sites from The Call of the Wild (a book I'd been using with my 8th graders; he had been in my class that very year) and some family history, as well. My great-grandfather, Addison Clark Dyer, had gone on that same Klondike Gold Rush that had inspired Wild. He had found a little gold, bought a farm near Walla Walla, Washington (lost to the family during the Depression). And Steve and I wanted to find his old claim on Bonanza Creek (we did) near Dawson City, Yukon.

We flew from Toledo (cheaper) into Seattle, where we stayed overnight with dear friends from Hiram College days, Claude and Dorothy Steele. Then a plane to Juneau. Then a tiny prop plane from Juneau to Skagway with a pilot who looked, oh, about Steve's age.

We rented a car in Skagway (the lot had two available; one started--one didn't; we took the former), and off we went on the Klondike Highway, over the White Pass (which my great-grandfather had walked over) and on to Dawson City, about 450 miles away. We spent our first night in White Horse, Yukon, where we went to see Howard the Duck at the local cinema.

Anyway, we had a grand time; the weather was spectacular (warm, sunny); and I took a jillion pictures of it all, pictures which I used in subsequent years to show my students while we were reading Wild.

Midnight Dome
Dawson City, Yukon
August 1986

Heading home, back in Skagway, we roamed through some shops, and it was in one of them that I bought my sourdough starter. I knew the substance had been a staple for the miners back in the gold rush days; I wanted to give it a try myself.

Back home in Hudson, Ohio, I mixed up my first batch, and ... failure. A loaf that reminded me in just about all ways of a brick.

I mentioned this to Joyce last night, and I commented how it seems so unlike me to have tried again. It would have been more in character if I'd cursed and hurled it all into the trash and forgotten about it forever.

But I didn't.

And since the late summer of 1986 I've been baking with the stuff regularly--at least once a week. I make not just loaves of bread but muffins, pancakes, waffles, rolls, etc. I give away some of it--especially to our older grandson, Logan, who just finished 8th grade and has a taste for the stuff. Sometimes he shares it with his parents and brother, Carson.

I have to "feed" the starter every week before I use it--adding three cups of flour, two cups of warm water, letting it sit for, oh, nine hours or so (overnight). In the morning I put two cups of the sticky substance back into the fridge in its "home" (see pic of the crockery below), then bake something with the rest of it.

Over the years I've added flour to the starter--flour that has some personal significance for me. Flour from Garrett's Mill in Garrettsville, Ohio, where my mother taught for ten years; flour from Lanterman's Mill in Youngstown (one of my maternal great-grandfathers was a Lanterman). And some other things.

It's taken me a long time to understand the dough--how long it likes to rise after being fed, how the mixed bread dough rises slowly or quickly depending on the ambient temperature, the humidity. In the summer, for example, it's ready to shape after about two hours in the bowl (see pic); in the winter, it's sometimes three hours.

In ways, it's like having a pet (I almost said a child, but that's a bit much): You have to deal with it regularly and well and with affection.

Even now--thirty-three years later--it will sometimes remind me who's in charge. I'll mess up, forget to do something. And I pay the price. Like the time I wasn't paying close attention, and I added too much oat flour to the bread mix. The loaves came out looking as creased and cracked as an Old Man. Like me. (I still ate every damn molecule!)

Sunday is my bread-baking day, and I generally make a multi-grain recipe I've developed over the years (decades!), though I sometimes do just whole-wheat. Depends.

I hope I can pass the starter on to my son and his family. There's something kind of selfish about it--as if they're keeping me (kind of) alive. In the fridge. Then ... once a week or so ... re-birth!