ah yes i remember it well. when i was in school, we had our own "barm babies". ours was named barmy miller. heh. we always removed half of it and then fed it. once we started our first sourdough, we split the barm in half. i got one and my partner in the class got one. sadly "barm-2-d-2" has gone to the great barm heaven in the sky. i just couldn't take care of it.

i could send you some of the recipes we used at school. we had a bunch of great sourdoughs that we made. good luck with it!!!

great story! another thing you can do to tame the creature is store it as a "chef", that is, a nugget of dough in a crock or other container full of flour (kind of nestled in the flour in the crock). i store it that way because i don't have a fridge and that way it stays un-putrid; it just dries out. then i reconstitute it and voila!

i love sourdough rye. i often throw some rye into any sourdough loaf i'm baking, just because i love the sweet unique flavor. today i baked an all-rye sourdough, which i haven't done in a long time. of course the loaf is always dense, tart, chewy and moist--awesome for slathering with cream cheese, but not the bread you'd pick for french toast. today it came out particularly yummy.

i just do a natural leaven. i mix my starter with rye flour and water to the consistency of a thick pancake batter. when it's ripe i double the quantity with more flour and water and let it ripen again. (this time i make it thicker in consistency, more like a thick mud.) if i want a lot of bread i'll double it again, or else i'll make the dough at this point. making the dough means adding some salt and then more flour until the dough can be kneaded. it doesn't really require much kneading, which is good because the dough is sticky. then i pop it into loaf pans and bake it.

i just found this very interesting recipe online and think i'll try it next time i have a hankering for a strong rye loaf. you might like it too:
www.westonaprice.org/foodfea...ead.html

in case you haven't discovered it yet, there's a fantastic book about natural leavens and sourdoughs called "the bread builders". it's my favorite bread book ever. it covers earth ovens too.

good luck,
alyson

i have a very old sourdough starter that i only feed every week or so. if I'm not using it i just remove some before feeding. it's actually recommended that you do that every time you feed. I'm not the greatest bread baker but we love to make pancakes and waffles out of it and i also add a scoop to my standard pizza dough recipe yum!

Being overwhelmed by quantites of sourdough starter reminds me of friendship bread - where one makes a large "starter" with the intention of sharing it with others. www.recipezaar.com/80457

This thread also reminded me of an erotic story I once read. A secondary plotline involves the value of a sourdough starter in an 1850 mining camp in the dead of winter. It is a story better read than described and I have a URL for the story, but I don't know if it would be appropriate in this forum.