Feeding the Bitch.

The title is a reference to "Kitchen Confidential" by Anthony Bourdain.  In his book one of his cooks calls in sick and asks the chef to "feed the bitch".  It's a reference to bread starter.  My wife loves sourdough bread so I've been making it.  I'm bored with it and I want to experiment so I started researching different recipes.

I'm a pretty smart guy, I can hold my own with chemistry and engineering even quantum physics is understandable (as much as a sane person can understand it).  Then I started looking at some of these sourdough bread recipes.  I feel like a moron now.  They were written in English but that's all I could really be sure of.

Some of these recipes used metric and they went insane with the precision that could had with that system.  One recipe called for 282 mg of water.  Personally I've always used ml with liquid but maybe mg's are easier to measure.  Fine, but another called for four different types of flour.  Maybe you could tell a difference but I don't think I could.  Some called for making a different type of starter.  That gave me ideas.

For the most part, these recipes assumed that you could rock in a kitchen and just wanted to add sourdough to your repertoire.  I'm not at that level.  My scientific side wanted hard facts and precise measurements (standard not metric) for variations on the basic sourdough recipe.  Nope, not going to find that.

Fine, just fine.  My artistic side is thinking that the starter is basically flour, water, and yeast.  It won't be expensive or difficult to experiment with that.  I've already started with one and am going to start a few more in a few days.

In a few days my wife will come home to a group of glasses in the kitchen filled with starter with a 3x5 card describing what's in it.