It's great fun to culture your own sourdough starter. We learn heaps, and it really is an experience - tending the baby, worrying if it will die from one of a million possible issues. Eventually, if we get through it all, we end up with our very own baby starter, which will become stronger as it ages.

It'll be a quarter of a century (or more) before your home made starter is as powerful as this one.

Back in 1990, beginner baker Warwick Quinton decided to get serious about his baking obsession, and made this starter using organically grown whole grains and pure water sourced directly from a spring in the Blue Mountains of NSW. Gradually, with lots of hits and misses, he cultured this fermentation to be ‘viable’ in his tiny kitchen in Waverley, NSW.

His starter took many forms in the years between then and now. It began as a  fermentation of cooked grains, a different grain for each day of the week, sitting in a window sill in the East Coast Sydney sun. The different grains would show varying effects in the way they fermented, and Warwick keenly observed the process as a scientist might. He had to. There was no internet at the time, so getting information about fermented bread and sourdough starters was fairly difficult.

There were failures, There were explosions ( seriously! ). There were more questions than answers. And then, there was life.

If you are interested in the full story of Papa, you can read it here.

A dough starter has a number of advantages over a liquid. It has a different mix of enzymes, and as such gives the bread a superior flavour and texture. It is also more stable, needing to be fed only occasionally. Typically, the starter is fed once every two weeks, though it will live quite happily for a month or more between feeds.