New Pet

We have a new pet; Bubbles, the sourdough sponge.

We are trying our hand at making sourdough, just like the early Californian gold miners. We picked up a starter pack at the Farmers Market in San Francisco a few weeks back. The starter pack contained a powdered yeast mix and instructions, such as:
"Think of the mother sponge as a sort of pet, you want to feed it, and keep it acclimate to its environment."

The main mix is called the mother sponge. We feed it twice a day with a mix of flour and water, the more frequently you feed it the more sour the final bread becomes. We needed somewhere warm (but not hot) to keep it, and the top of the fridge is consistently the right temperature (we guess).

To make bread you seperate off a baby sponge, feed it extra flour, and use it to start bread about a day later. When you feed the mother sponge you take out and discard a cup of the sponge, so rather than throw it away we used the first feeding to make a baby sponge, which will be used to make bread tomorrow.

Overnight Bubbles doubled in size, as it bubbled into life.