Inspiration: Over the past few years, I’ve struggled to make and maintain sourdough starters. Much like my fermentation experiments, my forays into these fermented starters always seem to crash and burn before I ever get to the good part — baking! Irritated at the latest failure, I sat down with a stack of cookbooks devoted to sourdough and started studying. Whereupon I found two simple tips/tricks that kept my starter alive long enough to bake with. 

First and easiest fix: wrapping the jar of starter in a kitchen towel. Apparently, my kitchen is a tad too cool for a starter to thrive and it needed a blanket. 

The second solution required a trip to our local farmers’ market, more specifically to the stall selling organic heirloom varieties of flour. According to several books, these small-batch flours contain a variety of micronutrients that help starters flourish, whereas plain old white flour from the grocery store strips away these nutrients.

And it worked!

Happy to have finally made a sourdough starter that lived longer than a couple of days, I started scouring these same tomes for a recipe and found a simple one in King Arthur Baking Company’s Baking School — a straightforward Sourdough Sandwich Bread recipe. 

And it turned out magnificently fluffy!

Unsurprisingly, within a week of making this loaf, my starter died — again. But now I’ve hope!

There’s a similar recipe on their website, but it has way more steps and ingredients. I would highly recommend purchasing the book instead. Over the years, Baking School‘s become the baking book I keep turning to when I need a recipe that turns out beautifully the first and one hundredth time. (BTW: I’m not paid for this review or for making the recipe; I just really like their stuff.)

Christie’s Canon of Characters: Though Agatha Christie’s sleuths often struggle to find and nail down that book’s ne’er-do-well, I don’t know if they’d apply the same deductive reasoning to their failed bakes. Poirot probably would, though I can’t imagine him flubbing up repeatedly on something as supposedly simple as a starter. 

Miss Marple probably mastered this technique early on and teaches it to the long string of maids she hires to help her out around the house. Perhaps Tuppence would struggle? Only because she’s pulled hither, thither, and yon by her three kids, husband, and murder cases. Colonel Race globe-hops entirely too much to even contemplate something as needy as a starter. 

Superintendent Battle, yes, he’s the one who would both want to try making bread and figure out why it failed. He strikes me as a man who would enjoy puttering around the kitchen with his wife and daughters during his off hours. Perhaps not failing on purpose, but still enjoying the exasperation of one of his female family members showing him “the right way” to ensure the bread turned out every time!

P.S.: Here’s a picture of the modest Dagwood Sandwich I made that night for dinner using the sourdough bread!

My 52 Weeks With Christie: A.Miner©2025