In a post which I wrote days before Easter, I promised to make videos about making sourdough bread. Today we begin with making your own sourdough starter. Bellow the video is the recipe I follow with some notes that did not make it into the video. Enjoy!

Following is the recipe that I follow (hat tip to good folks at Breadtopia.com):

• Step 1. Mix 3 ½ tbs. whole wheat flour with ¼ cup unsweetened pineapple juice. Cover and set aside for 48 hours at room temperature. Stir vigorously 2-3x/day. (“Unsweetened” in this case simply means no extra sugar added).
• Step 2. Add to the above 2 tbs. whole wheat flour and 2 tbs. pineapple juice. Cover and set aside for a day or two. Stir vigorously 2-3x/day. You should see some activity of fermentation within 48 hours. If you don’t, you may want to toss this and start over (or go buy some!)
• Step 3. Add to the above 5 ¼ tbs. whole wheat flour and 3 tbs. purified water. Cover and set aside for 24 hours.
• Step 4. Add ½ cup whole wheat flour and 1/4 to 1/3 cup purified water. You should have a very healthy sourdough starter by now.

While the above recipe, as I mentioned in the video, asks to wait 48 hours between Step 1 and Step 2, the last time I made the starter there was plenty of “activity” to proceed after 24 hours. Stay tuned for the next video tomorrow.

If you ever baked a loaf of bread before, you can easily get hooked on everything related to sourdough. I got hooked a while back, and tried to document some of my early failed attempts to make sour dough starter.

Now I generally bake at least one loaf of bread each week, some times more. I have even made an attempt use the sourdough to make a pecan nut-roll (pictured bellow), made sourdough focaccia bread, sourdough pancakes and some other yummy stuff. Unless there is no other way around the recipe, I tend to stay away from commercial yeast.

My wife’s recent video inspired me to make a few videos as well. To start off it my first videos will be related to sourdough bread making.

I plan to being those videos tomorrow. To star off, I will show you how can you make your own sourdough starter. I will follow what I call a “bullet proof sourdough starter recipe“, which I learned form the good folks at Breadtopia.

If you would like to follow along, you will need the following:

• Whole wheat flour. I recommend the King Arthur flour, but any whole wheat flour will do.
• No sugar or unsweetened added pine-apple juice. Look for it in the whole food section of your store. If you can’t find it, just pick can or two of diced pine-apple. Look for the kind that says “no sugar added” or “unsweetened”.
• A plastic container (about 1/2 to 1 quart)

Even if you never backed a loaf of bread before, you might enjoy doing this with me. While sourdough bread tastes great, there is also another aspect that I truly enjoy when working with sourdough- and that is working with nature itself, where nature is actually the true artist.

Enough said! Get your ingredients together and come back tomorrow!

My husband and I have been making (and drinking) our own Kefir for a couple of months now. It all started with my surgery. Back in September, doctors removed my thyroid (or whatever there was left of it).

I have been dealing with thyroid problems since I was 18 and when I was 28 half of my thyroid was removed. Last summer my doctors began to worry about a goiter that was rapidly increasing in size and they recommended a complete removal of the other half of my thyroid. The surgery was successful. However one of the temporary side effects of such surgery is drop of calcium levels. To remedy that, I was put on the maximum doze of calcium supplement, while my endocrinologist suggested to drink Kefir as well.

Kefir is a good source of probiotics, which helped me a great deal since the doze of calcium I was taking always upset my stomach. Kefir is also an excellent source of calcium as well, so it became a regular item on our shopping list, until the time when my husband cam across a website called Cultures For Health and learned that we can make our own Kefir at a 1/3 of what it cost in the store. Our local ShopRite carries Kefir at $2.99 a quart. When using the gallon of milk form the same ShopRite (at $4.19 a gallon) our home made Kefir costs us about $1.05 a quart. Even when we factor in the cost of strawberries or blueberries (our two favorite flavorings for our Kefir), we still beat the store bought Kefir by a huge margin.

Beside the economic factors spelled out above, the home made Kefir has a greater number of probiotics. It sure tastes much better!

So what is kefir you might ask? To put it simply it is a fermented milk drink with tons of probiotics and other goodness your body will appreciate.

How do you make your own Kefir? To make your own Kefir you need to get your own Kefir grains from some or to purchase them on the internet as we did. When conditions are right, Kefir tends to multiply and people generally do not mind sharing their grains.

While there are many places you can purchase Kefir grains from, we bought our from Cultures For Health. But no matter where you get your Kefir grains from, more than likely your grains will come in a dehydrated form. In the video bellow Julie Feickert from Culturse for Health shows you how to activate your grains.

I would also encourage you to try kefir first before getting your own grains. Buy a quart from your store and see if you like it first. There are a few things you need to do to keep your grain healthy. But the best way to take a good care of your kefir grains is to keep making kefir.