Day 7 (Evening): Chrysalis

In order to be totally certain the the culture had fully fermented, I fed the culture in the glass jar at 6pm on Day 7, and if it rose 3 inches by 9pm, I would put together the dough and move even closer to the final goal. And let's just see what happened...

6pm (Before)

7:16pm (getting there!)

8pm (2 inches is good enough...)

8:38pm (BINGO)

My culture was officially ready! Really, ready, in fact. I scaled and measured the wonderfully short list of ingredients from Ed Wood's partial whole wheat sourdough:

• Culture
• Whole wheat flour
• Unbleached white flour
• Salt
• Water

One issue I did not take into account with the ingredients was the consistency of my culture. I had been pretty much throwing in a somewhat random amount of water with each feeding, achieving a varying consistency. Ed Wood stated that it should be a thick pancake batter, but there was no way to really tell if my version of a thick pancake batter was the same as his. So, figuring that all will work out without giving it a second thought, I used the exact amounts for each ingredient as specified.


This time I let my mixer do some of the work (score one for the bad guys). The result was a strong dough with a pleasant feel. It seemed firm, despite the warnings of wet dough in King Arthur Flour's Whole Grain Baking, but I didn't worry, and let the dough grow for the next twelve hours into Day 8. I was reminded at the time of the simple stages of the life of a butterfly. My dough had been a creeping caterpillar for the past several days, slowly growing and preparing for a change, and now it had undergone a dramatic, temporary change, with a completely different future to behold the next day.