When I started making/eating whole wheat bread a couple years ago I let my sourdough starter die. Lately I've been thinking about getting back into it, and even trying whole wheat sourdough, but I'd need to get some starter started. This has taken a week to ten days in the past.

Yesterday, I was processing elderberries for jelly and something dawned on me. These wild elderberries have a white coating on them when they become ripe and that coating is wild yeast. So I thought why not toss a few in my starter and see what happens?

50g of whole wheat flour, 50g of water, and three elderberries. Mixed it all up good and set it on the counter. This was about 1400 yesterday. This afternoon, I added 100g of bread flour and 100g of water, and fished out the elderberries. Three hours later and check it out.



It worked! What normally takes 7-10 days took 27 hours. It's still got a ways to go before I can bake with it I think, but this is pretty cool. Biology rocks.

To be brief, there is a "false rise" often in the first couple days.

Possible, I suppose, but I've never had that happen before. And there is no off smell.

I make whole wheat sourdough bread as well as many other sourdough recipes.

Today I made batch of sourdough cinnamon scones. They are fermenting tin the refrigerator overnight and will bake in the morning.

A wild yeast? Have someone you don’t like eat some first.

Seriously, I have never done this before so it may be perfectly ok.

That's what sourdough is...local wild yeast and some bacteria.

Nice food from the whole wheat and yeast from the berries kicked things off nice. I left my starter in the fridge for about four months and pulled it out a couple weeks ago. It took 5 feedings but it got happy again.

We were gifted a start sample of a friend's settler grandma to the Salmon River
country. Still vital after weekly sour dough pancakes over last 30 years.

My daughter bakes sourdough breads and sells them on FB with weekly drops in the fall and winter, it's too hot to do it in the summer here.

Sourdough cookies, breads, etc. good luck with your "elderberry" dough!

If you'd like to checkout her FB page....

https://www.facebook.com/profi...hp?id=61574611255252

There are people selling 200+ year old sourdough starter on Etsy, some are supposedly even older.