Bread...

With my strange and sudden urgency for collecting food storage I started thinking really hard (possibly to hard...ahem) about bread. How is bread made?

Now, I have made bread from scratch many times, but in this case I don't mean adding packaged yeast, water, flour, sugar, salt etc. to get bread. I am thinking more along the lines of "How the heck did generations of the past make bread?". Back then you could not just go to the store and purchase yeast packets. Did they eat flat bread then or did they have a special technique to leaven their bread? And if so how?

I don't ever recall learning anything about this on any of the cooking shows I have watched or cook books I own.

I started searching the Internet for answers and was surprised at what I found. For hundreds of years people made their own bread starters using the wild yeasts and bacterias that lived all around them. They would simply mix up some ground wheat or rye with water and let it sit and ferment on their kitchen table for a week. If they were lucky they would get the right ones and the mixture would begin to bubble and ferment. They would call this their starter. They would then use some of the starter in their breads and "feed" the left over starter. It would continue to thrive until the next batch of bread was ready. If you were diligent in feeding and caring for your starter dough you could keep it alive for years and years at a time. It is said that the flavor of the resulting breads depended on the type of wild yeasts and bacterias that lived in your area and that the starter would get better tasting with time.
Starters were so important that families would hand down starters from generation to generation and keep them going.

I even found reference of the gold miners in California sleeping with the starters they would bring with them to keep the starters from freezing and dying in the cold. There is even a starter you can purchase on the Internet that is supposed to be from one of the famous starters from San Fransisco that is supposed to be several hundred years old. You can purchase French starters, African starters, starters from just about anywhere if you know where to look on the net. Kind of weird but hey...if you are crazy about making bread I guess this would be pretty cool.

I have decided to try making my own and hope I don't get grossed out to much to eat it. I have done the Amish friendship bread before and always got sort of grossed out at the fermentation process and the smells. I never really liked that sweet taste that resulted from it either. I do however really like the smell of store bought yeast in breads. Hopefully it will be more like that.

Strange, but I feel like if I can make this starter, and it doesn't turn out growing mold or something, that I would be better prepared to make one in the future if the need ever arises.