Upside-Down Pear

I’ve mentioned my sourdough starter, the whimsically-named Eduardo, before. I have some friends who find Eduardo strange, a disturbance, an oddity: this living thing I keep in my fridge and occasionally turn into food. It’s macabre, or scary, or - what if it goes bad?

In a way I can see their point, especially when I’ve failed to pay attention for a while and Eduardo’s gone all gray and watery on top. (Heh. Oops.) After all, what is scarier than the possibility of your food developing its own civilization? Aside from Pauly Shore movies, that is. Still, I’m more inclined to mail packets of dried starter off to friends than I am to be alarmist about Eduardo taking a turn for the Blob.

Mostly, he’s just all-purpose flour and water. He’s had other things in there: grapes, steel-cut oats, various flours, some whole grains. I like to experiment, and I wanted to see what I got when I experimented with starter. Not much interesting, as it turns out, though I’ll probably try grapes again at some point - gave the bread a lovely winey tasty.

He just is, this collection of feeding yeasts; this thing that turns out bread after bread and in-between times goes dormant in my fridge or bubbles on a warm radiator. He’s almost like another pet - ugly, but with a good smell and a tractable personality.