"original" lessons learned part of SD recipe

Bread baking I believe is easy but the amount of information on it will spin your head round and round. Every succesful and unsuccesful process for me took days even weeks to master a bread that may or may not taste good.

It is neccesary to post some of the lessons I have learned back when I was unable to manage a starter for long periods due to negligence. The bread that I referred to in my first post solely relied on commercial yeast, and we know from that had no sourdough flavor. Second, I tried to just grow the starter from scratch. OOps i had better give you my DEFINITION of a starter.

Starter: is a combination of flower and water stirred together that will be used to mix with bread flour to make your bread.
(How much flour and water to add? whether or not to add yeast? Feeding: how much? which amounts? how often? can you refrigerate? should you? these are all questions I hope to answer for you so you will not have to go through all of my mistakes.)

Back too Starter from scratch....I mixed equal portions of water and flour about a 1/2 cup each (later i learned to decrease amount of water to 1/4 cup) placed in an extememly clean glass measuring cup, atleast 2 cups covered with plastic wrap. I then fed it twice daily. (by removing a 1/4 cup of mixture and adding 1/4 cup of fresh flour and water) At some point in time the amount was suppose to increase or double go from a 1/2 a cup of mixture to a full cup or more thus telling me i had active yeast in my glass container. I would typically forget about long before it ever doubled.

Needless to say this never worked for me now I always add some small amount of commercial yeast to begin the process.

The most important thing I learned in the beginning, is WATER is crucial! Do not use City water even commercial yeast seems to suffer in city water bottled pure water only. If you believe, bottled water is the devil, it is said that you can leave tap water out for 6 hours or more and it will be fine. I have done this with my summer herbs replanted inside but i will probably never mix it with bread. To risky and has cost me a couple of really good loafs before I realized the cause.

So if you want something to due to begin baking bread my first blog bread Sourdough this is what you need to do. You MUST have these items (in my opinion to begin)

STEP ONE: warm 1/2 cup of bottled water(see above) stir 1/2 of one packet of active yeast if it gets frothy(bubly) in five minutes then it is active mix with one cup bread flour in clear container cover with plastic wrap tightly, do not refrigerate, leave on counter.

STEP TWO: remove 1/4 cup of mixture replace with 1/4 cup bread flour 1/8 cup bottled water. every 12 hours until doubled reaches 3 cups or so.