DIY -- that yeast

I realize that I already gave you instructions on making that yeast into hard cider with apple juice.

What else can you do with only one package of yeast?  Well, unfortunately, you want more flour to do it.  You can start sourdough for bread with it. 

The recipe is in George Greenstein's Secrets of a Jewish Baker.  With sourdough bread at higher prices than regular bread, this is a really good book to have.  I paid about $10 for mine and it has saved me so much money.

But don't go into sourdough with your eyes closed.  To do it right, you need at least 24 hours to build the starter into sour.  That makes sourdough bread something you would only make on a weekend at home, but the build goes in steps and you have at least 8 hours per step.  I sometimes start the last build before I go to bed and let it go longer than 8 hours.

And if you keep your starter between batches, you should stir it down every few days. So use up your starter before you go on vacation.

Plus every couple of weeks you have to take out half of it and feed the rest with a new handful of fresh flour.  The up side of that is that you can use the starter you take out to make sourdough pancakes from a recipe in the book.

On the other hand Greenstein's book doesn't just have sourdough recipes, it also has sweet dough recipes and cake recipes and a croissant recipe.... His "wine loaf" is something like old-fashioned madeira cake, but you can throw in dried fruit like cherries and nuts like walnuts and have something that is not only rich but somewhat healthy.

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