My brother-in-law, Travis, is a great baker (in addition to being a talented musician!). He makes awesome sourdough bread. Over Thanksgiving, I asked him to teach me, and together we made a starter (which we named, “Olga’s Starter”) and of course he made some of his bread from the La Habra Starter. I asked if he would be willing to share his knowledge with you. I hope you enjoy! (And if you’d like to make your own starter, he will be doing a follow-up post in the new year!) I took Olga’s starter home with me to care for. It’s almost ready to bake with… I can’t wait to try it!

Here’s Travis…

Hello, my name is Travis and Rachel married my brother, so now we’re family. She asked me if I would be into sharing what I’ve learned about bread here and I couldn’t have been more excited to share. I have an interest in bread. I love it. I love it with jam. I love it plain, with a spread of butter or peanut butter, I love it with sandwich things between it. And the smell of baking bread is definitely a favorite of mine. There is nothing better than fresh bread. Except maybe bacon.

So, about ten years ago I started looking into baking my own bread, and being kind of a science nerd I started learning about the way bread starters are used and made. I like sourdough bread and found that essentially a bread starter is a sourdough starter, so I dug a little deeper and found out that with a little patience and time it’s simple to make your own. And with a stable healthy starter you can make so many types of bread it’s crazy. You may also buy many good sourdough starters and each has a different story, which in itself is interesting especially if you like history. Check out the story of San Francisco sourdough.

Like many essential things, when you dig you find a lot of really sweet and interesting things.

Anyway so, here is an easy recipe for a simple sourdough bread, named after a starter I began in La Habra, CA. All good starters should have a good name.

In keeping a usable starter you use a lot of flour, and are discarding about a cup of starter every three days or so. I started to think about ways to use the removed cup of starter and made up this sweet pancake or waffle recipe.