I received a copy of Tartine Bread by Chad Robertson for Christmas.  I had asked for it, and I was really hoping that my husband would buy it for me.  Since it was the one and only item on my list for a very long time, my expectations were pretty high (ie. I would have been pissed if I didn’t get it, marched right out and bought it).

I love to make things from scratch.  I like cooking in general, but I LOVE to make bread.  Recently, I read that making your own bread is one way to get rich(er).  As in money.  Good suggestion, although my life is rich as it is, money or not.

I haven’t made any bread in a long time, and it was high time.

Turns out I wasn’t exactly prepared for the level of “from scratch” that the book detailed.  Duh!  I mean, it’s a book written by probably one of the best bread makers in the country, I really should have known.  Anyhow, it never occurred to me that the bread would need a starter that I would be expected to create, rather than bakers yeast.

I have never made bread from a starter.  I have never made a starter!  Aside from getting a bag of icky looking stuff under the guise of “friendship bread” (at the time I thought it should have been named “enemy bread” because who would seriously do that to a friend?) that I promptly killed, I didn’t even know that you could make bread without bakers yeast!  I am sad to admit that I also thought that friendship bread was a desert.  Maybe it is.  Like I said, I killed that starter every time someone gave me some, so I would never know.

Excitedly, I made a culture according to the instructions given in the book.  I thought it went well in the early stages, but within 6 days I had killed my starter.  Killed it.  Also, in the stages during which I thought it had gone well, it stunk.  Like plug your nose, bad stinky cheese crossed with the worst smelling feet you could ever imagine.  I had the stinky starter in my kitchen when I had my New Year’s Eve party, and every so often I would get a whiff of it and nearly gag.  It worried me.  I didn’t want my guests to think that my kitchen stunk (and I was unaware), or worse, that it was my husband’s feet (because of course it would never be my delicate tootsies).  The book indicated that the culture would have an odor of fermentation, so I thought maybe this was something I needed to come to terms with if I wanted to make authentic bread from scratch.  I was trying to decide if this would be a deal breaker, or if there was somewhere unobtrusive that I could keep my starter, rather than in my kitchen.  Such as the garage!

I pitched that dead, stinky starter.

A few days ago I started fresh, trying to get a new culture to grow.  This time, rather than using chlorinated tap water, I used bottled water that had been filtered and purified.  My thinking was that the chlorine in the water has the sole purpose of killing stuff, and maybe I don’t need every bacteria killed in the culture.  Perhaps it was allowing the stinky stuff to flourish.

Blah blah blah.  I can over-think just about ANY.THING.  I had the bottled water, I figured what the hell?

I am happy to report, for the second time, that I have what appears to be a flourishing culture.  It does look different this time, and it definitely smells different.  As in:  it doesn’t smell like anyone took off their shoes in my kitchen!  A victory in itself.

Cautiously optimistic that bread will soon follow.