I wasn’t going to bake today, but I needed to throw some dough around! Look, you can even push a face into it then knead the living daylights out of it if you so wish 😉

This is a part wholemeal loaf, 150g wholemeal flour and 225g white flour added to the 250g starter, 1 tsp salt and enough tepid water to make a soft dough.  It’s slowly rising over night, and will be ready to bake in time for tea tomorrow.

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I’ve been a bad starter mummy recently, I’ve busy with my sewing and forgot to feed the starter with fresh flour and water … a couple of days of neglect left it looking like this – The liquid you can see is called hooch, a slightly alcoholic by-product from the natural yeasts.  It’s not a problem – don’t throw your starter away!  You can either stir it in or pour it off, then remove half the starter and refresh as usual. Within an hour and a half of refreshing my starter was back to its happy, bubbly self.

(Ok, I stirred mine back in but I have since read that it is better to pour off the hooch as it can make your starter taste bitter … I’ll let you know if it has once the loaf is baked.  As it wasn’t a huge amount of hooch I don’t expect it to have made a difference to the taste.)

Hooch was also a very sweet alcoholic lemonade that I used to drink as a student in the mid-90’s …….

I’ll blog more tomorrow, I may even write a longer entry.