The
Sourdough Ambassador
I am fascinated by living foods.
I love yeast, vinegar, yogurt and wine, but most of all, sourdough. My
sourdough starter has wild spores of yeast going as far back as Chengiz Khan .
They were gathered on the steppes of Mongolia by my brother-in-law, the
Sourdough Ambassador. Mixed in with Chengiz is some starter from the San
Francisco Gold Rush and also the Alaskan Gold Rush. Everywhere he traveled in
the world he carried sourdough with him in a small plastic peanut butter jar. It is truly sourdough with a world class
pedigree. Best of all, where the
Sourdough Ambassador took some starter he also left some starter; Sourdough
Diplomacy.
Whenever the
Ambassador is in town, Sourdough pancakes are on the menu. So light they float
off the griddle, usually accompanied by outer space sound effects, smothered
with maple syrup and butter they are pure delight. I have heard that these pancakes are truly the
breakfast of champions and that many a basketball game has been decided by
which team was fueled by sourdough.
Sourdough is an
ancient food. It is created by capturing wild yeast spores from the air,
feeding them and allowing them to ferment. This is the natural, “free range”
leavening agent used in many breads in many parts of the world. Once you have
captured the spores in your starter you must feed them and give them water
regularly. The yeast consumes the carbohydrates and “exhales” carbon dioxide.
This is trapped by the strands of gluten in the dough creating bubbles causing
the dough or batter to rise.
The best way to
get starter is to find someone who already has a crock of sourdough bubbling on
their counter. Most people are happy to share. You only need about a ¼ cup
(57g) to begin but there are some strict rules and guidelines you must follow in
order to achieve success.
1.
Never mix or
store your sourdough in a metal container. Use only glass or pottery.
2.
Never use
metal utensils to stir the sourdough. The metal will react with the starter
causing a metallic taste and spoiling your starter forever.
3.
Never use the
entire starter, always hold back at least ¼ cup as the start for your next
batch of sourdough.
4.
Never give up
on your sourdough, it is amazingly resilient. Even if you forget it at the back
of the refrigerator and it grows an evil smelling dark liquid at the top, pour
it off, hold back about a ¼ to 1 cup and start the feeding process again. It
might take a few “refreshments” before it is usable but it will recover with
time.
Refreshment
or the care and feeding of your new sourdough:
Place the
starter in a small jar, crock, or non metallic bowl and mix in about ¾ cup
(198g) of warm water (85 ⁰-90⁰ F) and 1
¼ c. all purpose flour. Stir carefully
and cover with a damp cloth and/or plastic wrap and set in a warm place for
about 8 hours. For morning pancakes you will need to feed your starter the
night before. After 8 hours the starter should be bubbly and alive. This is
referred to as having “worked”. It
should have a sour, fruity, but not unpleasant smell. If it has not doubled in
size after eight hours do not give up, simply repeat the process with using 1
cup of the starter. Sometimes sourdough that has not been used regularly
requires several refreshments before it becomes active.
Using
sourdough:
REMEMBER! NEVER
COOK YOUR STARTER! After refreshment always take back at least ¼ cup of the
sourdough to use as starter for your next batch. Once you have added eggs or
milk to your sourdough it will be unusable as a starter for your next
recipe. Keep your starter in a small
non-metallic container and refresh it regularly. If you won’t be using it for a
while store it in the refrigerator, otherwise it can live quite happily on your
counter. The starter can also be dried and frozen for later use.
I have attached the history of the Sourdough Ambassador’s
Starter in his own words which makes pretty entertaining reading.
Sourdough
Ambassador Pancakes (in his own words).
The night
before you want to make pancakes, add enough flour to your starter to make
enough sourdough for the number of people you plan to feed. Usually about 1 1/4
to 2 cups will feed a family of four. When the starter has “worked” it will be
light and buoyant with bubbles on the top and throughout the mix. Take back 1
cup of starter and place it in the refrigerator for next time.
To the
remainder add:
1t. salt
2T. sugar
1 room temperature egg
1 t. cooking oil
Add enough
evaporated milk to bring the mix to the desired batter consistency.
The last step is to mix in one
teaspoon of baking soda.
Allow to
stand 3-4 minutes to allow soda to “work”. The soda reacts with the lactic acid
in the sourdough starter. This reaction is fueled by the sugar that was added
and gives off carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide forms bubbles and you can
actually see the mix rise in the mixing container. When the mix has “ worked”
you are ready to cook.
Cook on a hot, lightly greased
griddle making 3-5 inch diameter cakes. This allows for quick rise and cooking
all the way through with no raw dough in the center.
I have included the history of my sourdough starter written by the Sourdough Ambassador himself:
SOURDOUGH WITH A PEDIGREE
The History of My Sourdough Starter
Clay Alderson aka The Sourdough Ambassador
It must have been about the summer of 1965 when I was
working on the trail crew in Grand
Teton National Park. I was strolling along the boardwalk in Jackson, Wyoming
and passed a familiar book shop just off the town square and went inside to
take a look at the day’s offerings. The
proprietor was a good friend and perusing the books was a favorite Saturday
activity. It was here that I took my
first step on the road to sourdough cookery.
I purchased a book called “Sourdough Jack’s Cookery: Authentic Sourdough Cookery from his Country
Kitchen” by Jack Mabee. It was a small
paper backed book with a comb binding but in the back was an envelope
containing genuine dehydrated sourdough starter. The story in the book attributed the origin
of this starter to the San Francisco Gold Rush of 1849. I bought the book.
It was late in the summer and my seasonal work in the park
was about to terminate. I didn’t get a
chance to activate the starter so it traveled with us back to Kansas where it remained in a box with other
books and things for a period of several years.
One day in about 1970, while living in Meriden, Kansas, I was digging
through some things from the Grand Teton days and I found this book with it’s
envelope of sourdough starter. I sat
down and read the book and then read the instructions for activating the
starter. All it amounted to was adding
water and letting it stand in a warm place for a day or two and that was all
there was to it.
There were some details that had to be adhered to
however. You were never to mix sourdough
in a metal bowl. You were not even
allowed to mix sourdough with a metal spoon and allow the spoon to remain in
the sourdough overnight. The mix would
take on a metallic taste and it would set your teeth on edge and your mix would
never be edible after that. The other
caution was to never fail to remove some of the sourdough before cooking
because if you did you were out of business.
Even if you caught yourself before cooking up all of the starter you
would already have added eggs and milk and that would spoil and ruin the
sourdough. So I put the powder into a
crockery bowl and added water. It made
and sticky goo that I covered with a damp cloth to keep it from drying out in
the warm Kansas
weather. Then I put it on top of the
refrigerator to activate.
In a couple of days the mixture had increased to double its
original volume and bubbles had formed on the surface. When I stirred it with a wooden spoon it
revealed that the mix had transformed into a sweet smelling mass of frothy
bubbles. I couldn’t wait until the
weekend so I could try my new-found culinary delight on the family. Now this was not the first time that I had
exposed the family to what some of the Teton Trail Crew called my “farmer
food”. I had introduced them to bowls of
hot Lipton Noodle Soup for breakfast on cold mornings, and on hot summer days
ice cream was a good eye opener. I
considered Spam a delicacy and, with a honey mustard glaze, suitable for
serving guests on holidays, and a menu was seldom complete without Jell-O on
the table. My idea of a good green salad
is lime Jell-O with fruit in it and maybe a little whipped cream on the
top. To this day I fail to see anything
strange about this although my, now adult, children roll their eyes on those
rare occasions when the come to visit and find green Jell-O in their salad
bowls.
But the sourdough; that was the one acceptable gastronomic
family inheritance that was embraced by all and for all time. That first morning when I cooked up that
sourdough into flat golden discs that floated off the griddle and on to their
plates was what made dad an acceptable occupant of the kitchen. To that initial success I added some personal
touches. I made green pancakes for St.
Patrick’s Day and pink heart shaped pancakes for Valentines. I could make pancakes in the shape of letters
and each child got cakes in the shape of their initials. I added vanilla and chocolate for special
occasions and sometimes a little mint.
But the favorite remained setting out the basic flour and water mix
overnight, then adding eggs and milk with a little sugar and salt and enough
soda to make them rise. The soda was
dissolved in a small bowl with water and added at the last moment. Once the soda hit the mix it reacted to the
lactic acid in the fermented starter.
Using the sugar as fuel it formed carbon dioxide and the mix began to
swirl and bubble. It was like magic and
the kids begged to be the one to put in the “magic potion”. I was never sure if the magic was in the mix
or the production. I sometimes would
walk around the kitchen with a cake on my flipper pretending to be straining to
hold it from floating up to the ceiling on its way to an empty plate.
The family grew up on sourdough and my work took me from Kansas to new parts of
the country until finally I ended up in Skagway,
Alaska. This was the point of entry into the frozen
north that in 1898 brought hundreds of thousands of gold hungry stampeders into
the southeastern panhandle of Alaska
on their way to the Yukon
during the Klondike Gold Rush. The term
“sourdough” was synonymous with being a seasoned northerner.
My cousin, Neva McKittrick, had come to Alaska many years before me to teach school
in Valdez. She had married the owner of a local grocery
store and enjoyed a colorful life in the “Last Frontier”. Her husband was Bill Egan who was active in
territorial politics and served as the first governor of Alaska from 1959 to 1966. He was also the forth governor of Alaska serving from 1970
to 1974 and remains the only Alaska Governor to have been born in the state.
Bill passed away in 1984 and Neva
was living in Anchorage
when I arrived in Alaska
in 1982. Business trips frequently took
me to Anchorage
and I always made it a point to stop and visit Neva
on those trips. On one of my visits I
mentioned my exploits in sourdough cookery and she said she had a starter that
originated in Nome
during the gold rush of 1909. We
reasoned that it probably had come up the Inside Passage
to Skagway and
over the Chilkoot Trail and down the Yukon River
during the rush to the Klondike. Many of the Klondike
stampeders ended up in Nome
when that gold rush took place. So she
gave me a bottle of her precious Nome
sourdough starter and when I returned to Skagway
I added this to my San Francisco Gold Rush starter. Now I had sourdough with two gold rushes in
its pedigree.
I continued to make sourdough pancakes for family and
friends in Skagway
most every Saturday morning. In fact
some of our breakfasts lasted most of the day.
I branched out to make breads and rolls but nothing was quite a
successful as the pancakes. I even
started cooking breakfast for local events including large groups of over a
hundred people. I would start a couple
of weeks before the event and begin with a couple of cups of sourdough starter
in the bottom of a five gallon bucket.
Every day I would add enough flour and water to make a little more
sourdough until I had a five gallon bucket filled, sometimes to
overflowing. If you misjudged the amount
of flour and water or if the room temperature gets a little warm the sourdough
will become so active that it grows right over the top of the rim of the bucket
and nothing is harder to clean-up than sourdough dried into the living room
carpet.
I have had some funny experiences with the sourdough that
added to its mystique. Once I forgot
about a bucket of sourdough that I had set in the garage and one day I noticed
a caustic odor emanating from behind the work bench. There was the sourdough bucket containing
about a gallon of green fuzzy mold that smelled a lot like paint thinner. It was winter so I took the bucket out in the
yard and distributed it in a large circle on top of the snow. The next spring the snow melted and the grass
in the yard started to green up and grow; everywhere but in the circle where I
had dumped that sourdough. It took about
three years before grass would grow in that circle.
By the time we moved from Utah to Alaska my oldest son Benjamin was married
and was living in Virginia. He came home to pick up some things that he
had left stored in our house along with an old Datsun pick-up truck he wanted
and was surplus to our Alaskan needs. He
loaded all his stuff into the back of the truck and as he got ready to head
east he said that he would like a sourdough start to take with him. I fixed him up a crock of sourdough and he
added that to the things in the back of the truck. When he got to Denver the truck gave out on him and he had
to do some major repairs in order to continue the trip to Virginia.
He is pretty handy with fixing things but in the process of getting
tools out of the back of the truck he knocked the crock of sourdough off the
tailgate and it broke all over the top of an old school desk that he was
transporting. He reported with some
sadness that he had lost his sourdough starter.
Several months later I was talking to him on the phone and
he said that he had cooked up a batch of sourdough pancakes for his family that
morning. I told him that I thought he
had broken his sourdough crock and lost his starter. He said that all that was true but when he
got home to Virginia
he threw the school desk out in the back yard with some of the sourdough still
stuck to it. One morning he got hungry
for sourdough and went out and scraped some of the dried sourdough off the top
of the desk and after a few days of adding flour and water and allowing it to
stand in a warm place he was able to make pancakes and had his starter
back. It was somewhat like what I had
done many years earlier with the powder supplied by Sourdough Jack in the
little folder in the back of his book.
The final component in the pedigree of this sourdough comes
from half way around the world. In
1999-2001 our travels took us to Mongolia to help the Government of
Mongolia develop a management program for their newly established system of
National Parks and public lands. In the
little town of Hatgal
in north central Mongolia
where we lived there was a bakery that supplied the town with bread. When we returned to Hatgal in 2006 for a
visit we went to the bakery to purchase bread.
I noticed there was a plastic pail of bubbling batter standing in the
middle of the room. Through our
interpreter I asked about the mix and learned that it was the leavening that
they added to the mix to make the bread rise. One sniff told me that it was
sourdough. I got a small container of
their sourdough and carried it all the way back to Alaska and added it to my sourdough crock.
My sourdough mix is complete now. I have strains of starter from San Francisco, Nome, and Hatgal. It is an energetic mix of flour and water
with just the right amount of active spores to make it active, tasty, and sweet
smelling. I have kept the original
starter going nearly 40 years and have never used a metal utensil to store or
mix the starter. I have been careful to
not cook up the basic starter so there is always plenty of starter to add to
next time we want some pancakes. I have
shared my starter with hundreds of people throughout the land. I think Sourdough Jack would be proud.
