Gluten Free Sourdough Culture

 So, I am working on finishing a post about the gluten-free sourdough bread I've been working on the last few months and I realized in order to do the bread, folks will first need to be making the gluten-free sourdough culture to use in it. If you have never had a sourdough culture for a pet... you are going to love it. This is a symbiotic creature that - if you feed it and care for it properly - will pre-digest grains for you and make them more digestable and more nutritious. It will be the best excuse in the world to bake something because as you feed it, it grows. And, unless you take some away now and then it will become a great big beastie and take over your kitchen - or you would have to throw some of it away which I (shudder::waste::shudder) could never do.

How do you start a culture? I have no idea. I've been super duper lucky to get both of the cultures I've worked with donated to me by a friend. So, if you don't have a friend with a culture you may need to order one. (A culture, not a friend...) My friend originally used this kind, which are not very expensive and super easy to get started with.

I keep my culture in a bowl on my counter covered loosely with a towel. Her name is Althea (yes, I name all my pets - and my cars - don't judge me.) and I feed her morning and night with about 1/2 to 1 cup of brown rice flour and 1/2 to 1 cup of filtered water depending on if I have plans to bake something in my immediate future. You can tell when your culture is happy because it will be bubbly and have a nice smell. If you get a coat of slimy water on top and a vinegar smell, just pour off the water and feed it more flour. It is really super easy to keep it happy once you get it going.

If you are not planning to bake for a while or are going out of town or run out of brown rice flour for your sourdough to eat - no worries! You can always put about a cup of culture in a sealed container in the fridge and it will go dormant for a while, until you bring it back out and feed it. Be sure to label the container (here's where that name comes in handy...) or you may think it's something gross and through it out. Guess what happened to the one and only kombucha scoby I ever got my hands on...

Once you have your culture going there is SO MUCH you can do with it! I would get a cup of it out in the morning, mix in a few eggs and some baking soda and make crepes with it. I mixed a cup of it in with muffins for a greater depth of flavor and made awesome coffee cakes with it and of course, I made bread with it. Which I will be posting about very soon. I promise.