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Back in 2001, during the dotcom crash, I was unemployed a few months, and really got into sourdough at that time. It was pretty awesome. But loaves keep their own time, so I couldn't maintain it when I had a job again.

fwiw, I got my culture from grapes mashed in flour, per Nancy Silverton's Breads from the La Brea Bakery recommendations.

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A friend had a Nancy Silverton pizza while in LA a couple of months ago and raved about it (she usually doesn't rate pizza highly for some strange reason), so we followed her recipe for pizza dough: https://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2011/10/nancy-silvertons...

It was the first time I've ever made 'bread' and been happy with the result - it was some of the best pizza I've ever had. I almost makes me want to try making a sourdough again but I don't eat a lot of bread these days.

Myhrvold & Company poured cold water on the idea that grapes and raisins help a starter get going in Modernist Bread. I believe they went into detail on a "Bread Crumbs" podcast you can find on Heritage Radio. Probably this episode:

http://heritageradionetwork.org/podcast/mother-may-i/

These days, I'd buy a starter online. There's a market for them now, that wasn't really there when I got into it.

Why?

Mix flour and water, let it sit for 5 days, adding a little bit of flour and water daily to feed it.

You don't need to purchase a starter.

I like the idea of incorporating locally available microbes but forgive my ignorance: is it safe?

Oh, it's perfectly safe. You can tell by the smell... a healthy sourdough culture smells healthy, a rotten culture smells rotten. The yeast/bacteria system is extremely tough and resistant to other microbes and molds.

I did it for years and my family's still here :-)

Survivor bias!

Whenever you feed your sourdough starter, or add locally bought flour, or anything along those lines you are introducing locally available microbes.

A sourdough starter from SF won't be a SF sourdough for long just because of the microbes in the air/flour as you continue to feed it.

It becomes it's own living and breathing organism that you have to take care of or it dies.

Mostly to see what it's like. The businesses selling starters focus on historically interesting, important, or notoriously good starters (like the "San Francisco sourdough", or the oldest known starter in the world, salvaged from an Egyptian tomb). I've done my own wild starter, and my daughter has also done wild starters (in her case, she made a rice bran starter for making Japanese nukazuke pickles).

So mostly, it's the academic interest.

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