Tag: From Scratch Cooking
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How to Store Sourdough Starter in the Refrigerator
You don’t need to bake sourdough every day to keep a starter. For occasional bakers, the refrigerator may become your best friend. Why Refrigerate Sourdough Starter? Cold temperatures slow fermentation. That means your starter consumes its available food much more slowly than it does sitting on a warm kitchen counter. Instead of maintaining a frequent… Read more
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How Much Dried Herb Equals Fresh Herb?
We’ve all done it. You find a recipe calling for fresh herbs… and all you have is a jar of dried herbs. Or your garden is overflowing with fresh herbs while the recipe calls for dried. Can you substitute them? For ordinary culinary cooking, there’s a useful starting point. The Common 3-to-1 Rule A frequently… Read more
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What to Do With Too Many Zucchini
If you’ve ever grown zucchini, you already know. You don’t really harvest zucchini. Zucchini happens to you. You pick everything you can see and somehow return two days later to find a vegetable approximately the size of a baseball bat hiding under a leaf. So what do you actually do with all of it? Eat… Read more
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How Often Should You Feed a Sourdough Starter?
One of the first questions I had about sourdough was: Am I seriously supposed to feed this thing every day forever? Thankfully, no. How often you feed a sourdough starter depends largely on where you keep it and how often you bake. If You Keep Your Starter on the Counter A starter kept at room… Read more
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Why Is My Sourdough Starter Not Rising?
You’ve fed your starter. You’ve waited. And…nothing. Before assuming your sourdough experiment is over, remember that several things can affect how quickly a starter rises. Your Kitchen May Be Too Cool Fermentation generally moves faster in warmer conditions and slower in cooler ones. A chilly kitchen can turn a normally energetic starter into a very… Read more
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Is My Sourdough Starter Dead? How to Tell
You open the refrigerator, look at the forgotten jar in the back and think: There is absolutely no way that thing is still alive. Before you throw it away, take a closer look. An established sourdough starter can sometimes survive periods of neglect better than new bakers expect. Inactive Doesn’t Necessarily Mean Dead A starter… Read more
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Sourdough Starter Troubleshooting: 12 Problems & How to Fix Them
Sourdough starter is alive, which means it doesn’t always behave exactly the way we expect. One day it’s overflowing from the jar. The next, it barely moves. If you’re new to sourdough, it can be difficult to know what’s normal and what’s a sign that something is actually wrong. Here are 12 common sourdough starter… Read more
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What to Do With an End-of-Summer Tomato Harvest
There comes a point every summer when the garden seems to decide that every tomato needs to ripen at the exact same time. One day you’re waiting impatiently for the first red tomato. A few weeks later, your counter is covered in them. That’s one of my favorite problems to have. Instead of letting an… Read more