An Ode to Sourdough.

Ahhh the yeasty smell, the aroma of freshly baking biscuits wafting through the house early of a morning. There is not a better way to start your day then with a hot from the oven sourdough biscuit slathered with butter and drowned in honey. Oh my!
I love sourdough. My affair with the stinky wonderful stuff started before I was even married. My daddy and I shared a common affection for it. One Christmas my grandmother gave him a stoneware crock, and her directions on making a starter. He never looked back. And I even joined him on his quest for the perfect sourdough biscuit.
There are so many directions for starting this wonderful stuff that I won't even try and go there. You can buy cookbooks on the subject. And even a Google search will reveal tons of websites about it. The way you start yours is all personal preference.
Here is my basic starter;
2 cups of warm water
2 cups of flour
2 tablespoons of yeast
small dash of sugar.
Let stand in a warm place for 3 days. It is ready to use, when it is bubbly and slightly stinky.

You need to place your starter in an earthenware or glass container, never, never metal. And never stir it with a metal spoon. My grandmothers instructions are quite adamant about this. She makes a note that it will poison you if you let metal touch it. I have my doubts about that...but I won't argue the fact.

Now to the biscuits;
Take 2 cups of starter out of your crock and pour into a large bowl
Add one tsp. of baking soda to the starter, this will start a foaming action. Stir and let it foam for a few minutes.
Next take 2 cups of flour and a dash of salt. Mix in a separate bowl. Cut in about 1/4 cup of butter, or Crisco, until this is crumbly.
Add your sourdough, mix well.
Now here is the deal, you can make drop biscuits, or rolled biscuits. If you want to make dropped, I think this is the ideal way for sourdough biscuits myself....but that is just me. Here is what I do. I place a tad of butter in the bottom of a cast iron skillet. Then I let it get hot in the oven. Not smoking hot, but hot. Then I drop the dough in the skillet. Place a dab of butter on top of each biscuit and bake till golden brown. This way makes a wonderful crisp bottom. YUM!
To make rolled biscuits you will need to add more flour until the dough isn't sticky. Just like with regular biscuits don't over do the flour and don't knead! I just pat mine out and cut with cutter.
Like I said this stuff is great you can do use it for many things. Pancakes, bread etc. I have never had much luck using whole wheat flour with it, I find it is very very heavy.
One thing I love to do with it is use it for batter for chicken fried steak.
All you do is pour a couple of cups over your cut up steak, and let it sit for an hour or so. Then flour as usual and fry. This is really great. And it makes the steak tender.

Now when you use your starter, you need to put back what you take out. Ex. If you use 2 cups, then put back 2 cups of water,and mix in well two cups of flour. And you need to stir it everyday, and use it at least once a week.

My daddy had his starter for 10 years. Yes ten years. When he passed away. I became the keeper of the sourdough. But......I killed it. Yes I did. After about a month or so it went bad. I don't now why...I think it just refused to be handled by anybody but my dad, and rebelled. I am sure when I get to heaven I will hear about it from him. He was very very attached to his dough. When he was in the hospital, before he passed away. I had to go back to the house, 70 miles away and make sure his dough was stirred. Good grief!

I have a funny sourdough story. I bet you are all surprised by that, but never the less I have one.

Back in my bride days, we were living on the Y Ranch. I decided to get a starter going because I have a husband that is extremely fond of biscuits. My dad gave the a crock, and I has Mammaws directions, so off I went on my quest for the perfect sourdough biscuit. It was working out great. Then one day it turned on me. Now those of you that want to try this, don't get discouraged. It is temperamental stuff and you may have to try a few times before you get the hang of it. Any way mine went bad. Really bad. Horribly bad. I was in a quandary about what to do with it. I couldn't feed to my chickens. Who knows what it would do to them. I couldn't pour it down the sink. What to do?
Well I decided to just pour it our on the ground by our burn barrels. Now why I did not just pour it in the barrel, to this day I don't know. That would have been the smart thing to have done....but I didn't. I just kicked some dirt over it and left.
We had a little Spanish family next door. And they had 3 of the cutest little girls you ever saw. My daddy's dog had a litter of puppies that needed to be gone, so Buck and I brought them one of them. They were this terrier/cowdog cross things, and were very ugly. But those little girls loved him. They named him Scobby. We always got so tickled because they didn't speak any English and Scooby always came out Es-Scobby.
Later in the day I had to go and feed my chickens. Having that chore done I started back to the house. Suddenly Es-Scooby comes around the corner of the house. He was staggering, and walking crooked. Every now and then he would stumble and fall and just lay there a second or two, then get up and try again. Oh my word! What was wrong with him. I started over to him....My heart stops. My eyes bug out! It can't be, can it? He has foam coming out of his mouth! Oh my Gosh! The dog is rabid!!!!!
What do I do? Well I run for the house. I mean it is clearly obvious that the dog is trying to attack me. In all my trying to get away from the rabies riddled dog, I stumble over something, I fall. When I look over at what I fell over, I see a pair of eyes looking at me, with a mouth full of foam under them. It is Sam, I mentioned him in an earlier post. Sam the poor stupid pound puppy. Sam is laid out in front of the porch. Hiccuping and moaning with white foam just pouring from his mouth. Oh my, he has rabies as well. This is just like a weird Stephen King movie,,,,,except this is real. I have two dogs right outside that have the hydrophobe, as the old timers used to call it.
What to do? I have no idea. Should I shoot them? Should I just leave them be until DH comes home and let him shoot them. And what if the little girls come out and start looking for Es-Scooby? During this conversation with myself I am wandering from room to room peering out my windows. I want to be ready should they attack the house, burst through a window, attack me and give me the rabies.
Finally after a few minutes I see both dogs. They are still staggering, and hiccuping, but the foam seems to have slowed down a bit. A while later I see them, they are both laid out on their backs, paws in the air a few feet from the burn barrel. I decide to be brave and go see if they are dead. With DH 232 in hand I proceed cautiously. I am praying, please let them be dead, please let them be dead. Slowly I approach. For a minute I think they are dead. And then I see a breath, and then a hiccup. They are laying there snoring, and hiccuping. And then it hits me. Those dogs were drunk as skunks.
Upon further observation I saw that the place I poured the rotten dough had been lapped up, clean as a whistle. How did they stand it? It was gross. But eat it they did. And drunk they were. Well what a relief. No rabies, just juiced up dogs.
They slept the rest of the afternoon. They didn't eat for about a day. But they suffered no ill effects. Needless to say Dh got quite a hoot out of the drunk dog's.
By the way...just so you know that I am not telling you a tall tell. A starter separates. The heavy dough goes to the bottom, and the water goes to the top. The water on the top was called, "hootch", and the old timers would drink it when they had nothing else. So there you have it. My sourdough, drunk dog story.

Here is my starter



The finished product

:
Yum! Butter and honey!

71

DS, having a plate of hot biscuits in the predawn hours, before he leaves to ride the range and rope wild bovines!



Uncle Taylor say's, " I want you! To eat more sourdough!"

God Bless, and Happy Trails
Ranch Wife