When I started my bread baking adventures a few months ago, growing my own starter was not on my radar. If anything, I was against it. It felt like so much work. The feeding, the maintaining. I didn’t want the responsibility. Even though one of my favorite books from last year made it sound like a lot of fun, I wasn’t convinced.

My curiosity got the best of me. After baking a number of loaves with commercial yeast, I wondered why people were infatuated with sourdough. Could sourdough loaves be that much better than what I was already baking?

I’m here to tell you yes, they are. They may not be worlds apart, but there’s a noticeable difference.

When starting out, it can be intimidating. How a simple mixture of flour and water (see picture above right) turns into an active concoction of live yeast is a marvel of nature. It’s also quite the science experiment, which I’m about 2 months into.

Here are a few lessons I learned in the process of growing a sourdough starter. This isn’t going to be about how to make one, or how to care for it. There’s plenty of how-to articles already out there.

Consider this a post to inspire you to grow your own starter or to press on if you’re struggling.

I enjoy tinkering and experimenting in the kitchen. Some of it is driven by my desire to maintain family recipes for apple pie and pierogies. Most if it is a desire to find ways to improve upon some of my favorite foods such as chocolate chips cookies, guacamole, and pasta. I also like to help Lisa cook a new dish for dinner every now and then, although it’s been a lot more ‘then’ than ‘now’ as of late.

When I tell people about my hobby, they tell me that I must like to cook. When I tell them I prefer baking, the typical response is, “aren’t they the same thing?”

While it might seem that way, they are two totally different things. Allow me to explain.

There are lots of tools and techniques you can use to get more consistent results from your baking or cooking. One of the easiest is to use a kitchen scale.

In the past, kitchen scales were rarely used by amateur cooks and hobbyists. The main reasons were convenience and cost. Older kitchen scales were bulky, took up a lot of shelf and counter space, and did not always provide accurate measurements. For those that looked good and worked well, the cost was prohibitive.

Well, times have changed. Today’s kitchen scales are compact, easy to use, highly accurate, and economical. As with most everything else these days, they have been transformed by the digital age, and they are easy to get. A search on Amazon for ‘kitchen scale’ yields dozens of results, with most available for less than $20.

I don’t need another category on my blog, and I certainly shouldn’t be taking on any new projects right now. But, I can’t help myself. I’ve decided to start a new section on the blog called the Test Kitchen.

The Test Kitchen is where I plan to collect lessons learned exploring different recipes and cooking techniques. I’m also going to keep my favorite recipes that I regularly come back to for cooking all kinds of things, whether it is cookies, pies, bread, pasta, guacamole, and more.

I’m not going to commit to a regular posting schedule. I’m just going to post when I have something to say, when it’s convenient, and when it makes sense. It may be once a week, once a month, or a couple of times a year. Who knows.

In the meantime, I’m going to move my favorite recipes into the Test Kitchen, and I hope to add more soon. To give you a preview, I’ve become addicted to the King Arthur Baking site over the last month or two and have quite a few thoughts I hope to share around bake goods, especially bread which I never thought I would make!

Stay tuned….