From Wardeh Harmon in Oregon. She discusses the science and the benefits of sourdough:
–No need to buy your yeast – the wild yeasts and lactobacilli in sourdough starter are everywhere in the environment, you just need to encourage them.
–Sourdough breads don’t stale as quickly.
-Sourdough starter is more versatile and resilient than store-bought yeast (for example, sourdough starter can tolerate a wider range of temperature and ph than storebought yeast).
Here Miho in Japan explains to thedailyenglishshow how she makes a natural yeast starter using fruit.
They experiment with three fruit based starters Miho prepares for from raisins, pommelo and grapes. The first stage of the process is fermenting the fruit in water until it is fizzy.
Then you strain out the fruit, put the strained liquid back in jars and mix flour into it. The ferment liquid-flour mixture should start to rise. It’s this yeasty dough that you use in your bread making.
The raisins won out in terms of producing a viable bread starter.
Mikey and Wendy live on an off-grid, homestead in New Mexico (see their Holy Scrap Homestead blog). As such, they were looking for more efficiency from their appliances. Mikey has come up with a temperature controller that has allowed them convert a small chest freezer into a refrigerator and so downsize from their full-size fridge that cost them a lot in energy and was underutilized.
The temperature controller can also be used to regulate temperature for stuff like tempeh and yoghurt making, incubation, heat pads, raising bread dough, and controlling the temperature on simple crockpots and on hot plates for tasks like candy-making. There are a lot of possible uses.
The design and instructions on how to build it are “open source” in other words, free, off his website but he also sells kits to build it yourself and already completed units from there, as well.
Here is Mikey talking about the controller and what he was able to do with it. BTW, I don’t know Mikey or Wendy and they haven’t asked me to blog this. Just stumbled across this and thought it should be shared.
Here’s Wendy making yoghurt using the device:
Wendy using the temperature controller to make tempeh:
The Real Know How 