Day 3 of the "I too can bake bread!" challenge- Toss and Feed

From here on out, it's so easy that you'll wonder why you didn't start making bread ages ago.

For the next few days, you will be again repeating the following steps but with a minor change. You will need to toss out 1 cup of your starter, before feeding it. Please do not move on to the baking segment until your starter looks frothy and bubbly.

For Day 3, you will need the following: 

• 1 cup of purified water
• 1 cup of Bread Flour or All-Purpose Flour (Not self-rising)
• Something to stir your starter with (chopstick, spoon, but please no metal)

Remove 1 cup of starter and toss it in the bin. Add your 1 cup of additional flour and water. Stir to combine.

Once combined, it should look something like this. This starter is almost ready to make bread.

After a few days, if your starter looks like mine (see above for reference), all bubbly and frothy, just put it in the refrigerator until the next tutorial is up about baking bread. 

The wonderful thing about starter is that it's pretty hearty once you capture the wild yeast. In the last post, I mentioned that you have about two cups of start, you will want to keep the volume around that. It's always best to refresh your starter with the same amount that you are keeping. So for instance, if you keep 1 cup, add 1 cup of flour and 1 cup of water...etc. 

Once your starter is frothy and bubbly, you can just place it in the refrigerator and refresh it every week by following the same instructions as Day 3. If your starter is not bubbly, try feeding it for a minimum of 7 days (with Day 3 instructions) before tossing the whole batch and restarting. I'm not sure why, but sometimes the yeast doesn't capture well, and other times, it just takes off.

Please let me know if you have any questions. I'll do my best to answer them. This will conclude the starter part of the challenge. Next week, we bake bread.

Until next post,