For starters: thats sourdough starters

I love sourdough bread in all its varieties and I've always quite fancied making it myself. Looking around some of my favourite food blogs recently I saw that sourdough is of those things people are trying out - maybe its the credit crunch that makes us all want to bake bread, I don't know, but it certainly seems to be on the rise (!).

A  bit of looking about, a bit of tweeting and it seemed that the king (and queen) of sourdough recipes comes from Sam and Sam Clarks 'Moro' cookbook. It doesn't seem hard (or maybe it is and I'm just about to find that out) but it requires patience - lots of it - four weeks of it. Like WHAT - I've got to wait FOUR weeks before I can even get close to baking a loaf....now I'm not especially renowned for my patience so I decided to go off and look for other starter recipes. But I kept drawing a blank - they seemed too short and they had easy blend yeast in them - like right that's not real sourdough its just a minor tongue tingle effect.

So back to the recipe from 'Moro' and a whole lot of patience.

Here's what you need and do:

1 bunch of red organic grapes (okay so these aren't organic but I hope it still works)

Strong white organic flour: 500g

Water: 1 litre

Put the grapes in a muslin bag and secure the top of the bag - just so:

Mix the flour and water together to create a sloppy batter that looks like this:

Bash the grapes around a bit with a rolling pin and remember to save the juices to add the mix.

Having added the juice in go the grapes:

Cover and now its just a waiting game - two weeks and counting to next stage......