History
The history has been asked for. All I know is that it started west in 1847 from Missouri. I would guess with the family of Dr. John Savage as one of his daughters (my great grandmother) was the cook. It came on west and settled near Salem Or. Doc. Savage’s daughter met and married my great grand father on the trail and they had 10 children. It was passed on to me though my parents when they passed away. I am 76 years old so that was some time ago. I first learned to use the starter in a basque sheep camp when I was 10 years old as we were setting up a homestead on the Steens Mountains in southeastern Oregon. A campfire has no oven, so the bread was baked in a Dutch Oven in a hole in the ground in which we had built a fire, placed the oven, scraped in the coals from around the rim, and covered with dirt for several hours. I used it later making bread in a chuck wagon on several cattle drives - again in southeastern Oregon.
Considering that the people at that time had no commercial starter for their bread, I do not know when it was first caught from the wild or where, but it has been exposed to many wild yeasts since and personally I like it. I hope you enjoy it.
While working on perfecting my homemade pizza I came across this website: http://carlsfriends.net/source.html
I was intrigued so I sent for a sample, it has not arrived yet. I have made my own sourdough starter over the years, but I am now without any so I am anxious to give some of this a go. We really enjoy our homemade pizzas here in my house. I have a modified electric tabletop pizza oven that I use and can get up to 700 degrees F. but my next project is a backyard oven. Of course no self respecting baker of New York Style Pizza would use anything BUT sourdough for the dough!
Here's an exhaustive site with extensive research into ingredients and techniques: http://www.varasanos.com/PizzaRecipe.htm This guy knows his pizza!
