desem bread
Hello I just finally got logged in. This web site has crashed my browser [surfari mac os X ] more times in one day than it has in 5 years. I switched browsers to get going. I have baked my third desem bread batch a few days ago and am pretty pleased with the result. But I have questions so I hope there are some other desem users here.
To begin:
I saw mountaindog's post on her experience baking with her starter. I tried to contact her directly but couldn't find a link. As I understand the instructions, there is this highly anal process to begin growing a a desem starter as opposed to a sourdough starter. It seems to be aimed at isolating the yeasts available to grow in the dough ball to just the ones that come already living on organicly grown wheat. The fact that to begin you just make a dough ball of pure water not tap water and coursely ground organic whole wheat flour and burry it in the middle of 10 lbs of organic whole wheat flour to gestate in a very narrow temp range of 55 to 65 degrees all seem to point at excluding the very organisms that mtdog used to get going. You can see her post elswhere on the forum or the websight. I don't really object to this per se but wonder is it really desem if it's ancestry is mongrelized in this fashion? I'm not that long a baker and mountaindog has much experience in this area. Also, I haven't seen everything she read to get going so maybe someone else said the instructions from Belgum weren't necessary. Anyone have any thoughts on this?
Ron