Preparation time: 2 weeks
Cooking time: 1 hour
Serves: 2
Making a sourdough starter to make traditional Flemish desem bread.
It takes two weeks to develop a desem. During this period, to help the new starter get going, you need to feed it every day with a small portion of fresh flour and water. You can use your desem to bake with after the first week.
In order to get your starter going a place with a temperature between 50-65 degrees F is necessary.
This recipe is a very detailed description of what needs to be done over the next couple weeks, and can be found here: http://www.astray.com/recipes/?show=Flemish%20desem%20bread%2C%20part%201%20%2B
I also recommend The Laurel’s Kitchen Bread Book: A Guide to Whole-Grain Breadmaking to get the full recipe.
If you are interested in a random tale of mushrooms and desem follow this link: http://www.helladelicious.com/articles/methods-of-mycelia/