This might be one of the most important lessons and this entire course, what we're going to do today
is we're going to take starter and we're going to learn how to dry it.
Set this way, we can put it into our freezer and freeze it.
So this way, if there's ever an issue with our starter that we that we're maintaining, we always have
some dry frozen starter that we can use to create a new starter very quickly, very easily.
Now, I love to do this on a fairly regular basis because there are some times that I will go where
I don't make a bread for two or three weeks.
And, you know, I just want to be able to start with a nice fresh starter.
You what happens from time to time or sometimes I want to go and share some starter with a friend of
mine.
I have something that's ready to go that they can use right away.
And it's really easy, right?
So the first time either you make your own starter or you buy your own starter, you can make your own
that you can use for for a later time.
And it's really quite simple.
All you need is some cellophane and some starter.
Now, the starter, you want to make sure that it is ready to go.
So if you take a look at our video, how do you know when you're ready?
You really want to use starter that is ready when it that's at its peak.
And again, what does that look like?
It means that it's going to be nice and fluffy.
It's going to be nice and airy.
If you do the water test, you can drop a piece of it into the water and it should floats.
And you should have just a nice, nice, sour smell to it.
OK, which this one does.
And all we're going to do again, it's really, really easy.
It's going to go ahead and take a piece of cellophane.
OK, let's take a piece of cellophane and then take a spoon, stretch out that cellophane, so this
way it's nice and straight.
Sometimes what I've done as well in the past is I'll just take a little bit of water, kind of dab it
onto the countertop and kind of creates a nice little nice little seal there.
So just to the other side.
OK, nice and flat, and what I'll do is I'll just take some of my starter again that's ready and I'll
just kind of spoon it out onto the cellophane.
And then I want to do is just kind of spread it out.
The thinner that you make it, the quicker it's going to dry.
And you can tell that.
Do you have to hold on to the self in a little bit?
And what's great about these these microbes is that they are very resilient, you know, they can handle
some pretty extreme environments, not being fed for extended periods, being frozen for extended periods,
being dried for extended periods, and they will come back to life.
You'd be really amazed even if you have a starter that you think has died because maybe you left it
out for too long, just in the fridge for too long.
If you just kind of go through the process of feeding it once a day, emptying out 90 percent of it,
feeding and taking out 90 percent, just keep going through that process.
It'll probably come back to life.
Because you don't need a lot of microbes in order for that started to come back, so again, I'm just
kind of spreading it out, you'll decide how much you how much you want to have.
But again, you want to try to spread out nice and thin.
I'm not going to add too much more because I already have a very large collection in my freezer.
Uh, but essentially what I'll do is just kind of make that nice and thin and all do is I'll let that
sit just like this out in the open and you'll notice that it's going to start to dry out.
It's going to start to get a little bit crispy in some of the places where it's a little bit thicker.
It's certainly going to take a lot more time for it to dry out.
So after a few hours, when the thinner outside start to dry off, sometimes what I'll do is I'll kind
of just like lift up the edge and start to kind of peel that back and turn it over.
This way, the the thicker bottoms will also be able to dry out.
Really, you could just leave it like this for two days or so and it should dry out completely.
So maybe we'll come back a little bit later and see what it looks like once it's had a chance to dry
a little bit.