Rusty - You've got it (sorta'). Even the recipes for this starter, and ways to use it, differ from person-to-person and recipe-to-recipe. I've collected a file on it over the last decade, or so, and no two seem to be alike. It's an overnight sponge method, would be the best way to describe it. I feed it rye flour when I want it for rye bread, as well as wholegrain spelt or wheat, but plain old all-purpose flour (milled in the town she lived it) is all my friend, who gave me the starter, ever used. I got my starter from a woman in her late 80's (she's now in her late 90's). She got her starter from her mother when she "set up housekeeping" as a young bride. She had used this method growing up, as did all her sisters. From the research I've done, it's a method that goes back about 100-125-years. She gave me a quart jar with about 1-cup of starter in it, along with some cryptic instructions. Good thing I was a seasoned bread maker and had used starter before or I doubt I'd have even gotten a loaf made. I quickly adapted to the overnight sponge method and used Everlasting Yeast cup-for-cup for any sourdough recipe I had used in the past from other types of starter. The night before: Mix the 1-cup starter with an equal amount of water, 1/4 c. sugar and beat in enough flour so the batter is about the thickness of pancake batter. Cover (I use a Quick Cover with a few air holes poked into it to off-gas) and let sit overnight in a warm place (my oven with the light on). The next morning: Remove 1 cup and store in the refrigerator in a 1-quart jar. My original jar had a sheet of waxed paper on it, held in place with a rubber band, and a few holes cut into the paper. I replaced that with a small Quick Cover with a few holes in it. The gal I got my starter from had never made anything other than white bread with the starter, while I've incorporated it into lots of different baked goods, pancakes/waffles, biscuits, cake, wholegrain breads, rolls, cinnamon rolls, etc... I like the overnight sponge, usually with a whole wheat flour in it, which lightens the loaf. I make sure I use the Everlasting Yeast at least once every 2-4 weeks to renew it. I never use tap water in it, although my friend did. We're not sure what the original recipe was, but here's some from my file. The methods used in the recipes below aren't anything like what my friend used. Recipe #1: Source - Capper's Weekly - C.P.W. Topeka, KS, January 18, 1947 EVERLASTING YEAST 4 med. potatoes, peeled 1 quart potato water 1/4 c. sugar 1 T. salt 1 package granulated yeast, dissolved in 1/4 c. water Cook and mash potatoes, saving water. Add enough water to potato water to make a quart and combine with mashed potatoes, sugar and salt. Cool. Add dissolved yeast. Place in 1/2 gallon jar or other container and allow to ferment at room temperature overnight. Then keep in refrigerator. One cup starter equals 1 cake yeast. To Make Bread: The night before, mix 1 cup starter, 1 cup water, 1/4 c. sugar and 2 cups flour. The next morning, add 2 cups water, 2 T. salt, 1/4 c. shortening and about 10 cups flour. Knead until smooth. Place in a greased bowl. Cover and let rise. When light, divide into loaves and let rise again. Bake 1 hour at 325F. When down to last cup of starter, it may be used to make another batch of starter instead of using yeast. That's why it's called "everlasting yeast." Recipe #2 Use glass container. 1 quart potato water or 1 qt. water + 1 T. potato flakes 1/2 cake yeast 2 T. sugar 2 T. flour 1 t. salt Mix well and let stand covered with net at room temperature for 12 hours. Leave about 1/3 c. in bottle. Use the rest when you make bread, do not need extra liquid with this yeast. To the 1/3 c. starter, add all the original ingredients except the yeast. Let stand again for 12 hours then store in refrigerator until needed. This can be kept going indefinitely, if you use it every 3-4 weeks. Recipe #3: (copied as written) Peel two medium sized potatoes and grate them into a plastic bowl, pour 2 cups of boiling water in them and stir until sort of thick like. Cool to lukewarm. Then put two packages of yeast that you have dissolved into the mixture and stir. Add 1/2 c. of sugar, stir in and set aside with a towel over the top. It will all bubble and when through bubbling take out all but one cup and use for the yeast called for in your recipe and put the leftover cup in the fridge. The day before you are ready to make bread again, take out your cup of yest and start over with the raw potatoes again and when this has cooled to lukewarm add the yeast that you saved, add 1/2 c. of sugar again and set aside to bubble. Always save a cup when you use it to keep your yeast active. You should keep this yeast fresh every couple of weeks at least. -------------------------------- This starter always makes a mild-tasting loaf of bread. Back 100 years ago they never called it "sourdough" bread. It was just "bread" using a natural leavening. If the starter got to the point they were getting "sour" bread, they would do what is called "sweeten the pot". This was done by taking a very small amount of the starter (a tablespoon or two) and repetedly feeding it until it was back to a couple cups of starter. Google - Everlasting Yeast - and you'll probably find even more recipes and stories of it's use. I have one newspaper clipping from Checotah, OK "Bread Starter 71 Years Old" and another from Bartlesville, Ark. "Bartlesville Family Has Antique Bread 'Starter' about using this same type of starter. -Grainlady

I emailed you a message. Good luck with your grain search. -Grainlady

Before going gluten-free, I nearly always used a 100% extraction - medium-fine grind (Nutrimill) for bread. I used an overnight sponge, which softens the bran, for making 100% whole wheat flour yeast bread. That is another way to lighten the loaf. Using a soaked flour method (Sue Gregg or "Nourishing Traditions") is another method to lighten the loaves because it softens the bran. Tempering the grain before milling, as well as bolting the flour, is yet one more method. The only tempered wheat I've worked with was called "heavy-bran" (from a local stone mill), and it was more like oatmeal. I developed several recipes for the mill with this product, but they decided not to continue production due to expense and hassle. I would sift the bran from flour milled for making "cake" flour (a 3:1 mix of soft white wheat and whole oat groats OR spelt), although softer wheat doesn't bolt as efficiently as hard wheat. I don't own a standard flour "sifter", but I use a series of food-grade mesh sieves I've collected over the years for bolting. I'm not even sure of the micron size of them. You can get sets that have 3 (or more) sizes to the set. Start with a large one and continue with smaller ones until you have achieved the extraction rate and particle size you'd like. If you make your own cereal or cereal blends for making cooked cereal (Cream of Wheat, Rice, Barley, Rye, 5-grain, 7-grain, etc.), that's another place you will want to sift the finer particles from the mixture before cooking it. If you don't sift it out, you will end up with "glue" for cooked cereal. Same thing if you make cracked wheat or bulgur. It is my understanding that flour is generally in the range of 35-70 micron opening mesh. Naturally, it depends on the grind from your mill. If you start with a coarse grind, you will get different results than if you mill your grain on a medium or fine grind. You will get a finer grind on many mills if you run the grain through on a coarse grind, then run the coarse flour through on a finer grind a second time. Yet one more option. I'm not sure what the sizes are for the various grinds of corn, but I might have something in my files and will post it if I find it. The finer the cornmeal -- the texture of the cornbread will be more cake-like. This would be the "coarse" setting used for milling cornmeal on the Nutrimill. You can't get a true coarse grind using an impact mill. I use a Corn Mill - steel burrs - for coarse grinding. Coarse cornmeal will be coarse and heavy when used for cornbread. Neither is right or wrong - just a choice. ;-) Sorry I couldn't be more help.... -Grainlady

1. Homemade is something made or prepared at home. It's just about that simple. It doesn't necessarily have to come from 100% whole foods or foods you produce or grow yourself. For instance, homemade chicken noodle soup... You COULD raise the chicken and make your own noodles, but the ingredients could also be purchased, or a combination of those choices - much like your lasagna. They are still MADE at home. I used to make homemade clothes. Clothes purchased from a store are called ready-made. I didn't produce the fabric or the notions to make homemade clothes, but it IS possible to do so. I knit homemade sweaters, but I don't raise sheep or cotton, and don't spin yarn, but it's possible to do so. 2. Prepared - ready-to-eat or ready-to-use. These can be foods YOU make, or commercially prepared. Your homemade lasagne can be frozen and used later, so it's a homemade prepared food. When you pull it out of the freezer, thaw, and reheat, it's a prepared food. Purchase lasagna in the freezer case - that's a prepared food. 3. Scratch - Scratch is actually a reference to something you haphazardly toss together, kinda like making vegetable soup when you really don't follow a recipe. Let's scratch together some breakfast... Others would say scratch is when you measure all the ingredients used in the recipe, but you didn't necessarily produce all the ingredients. 4. Convenience - Some of the preparation is already measured or mixed. I believe Bisquick was the original commercial "convenience" food (the dry ingredients and fat were all mix together and all you had to add was the wet ingredients). I make a wholegrain version of Bisquick, which includes freshly milled spelt, cornmeal and wheat; oatmeal (I flake my own grains), etc... and I consider this a "convenience" food, although I make it from scratch (measured and mixed all the ingredients). You can also make it from scratch using commercial ingredients (shortening, flour, baking powder, etc... Once I've got the mixture together, stored in the freezer, I can quickly make it into any number of things from biscuits to casseroles or desserts, just by using Bisquick Recipes. 5. I like simple preparation, simple food (we use whole and raw foods a lot - produced at home AND purchased. We're not self-sufficient by any means. The least amount of processing is my preference, but that doesn't mean I make everything. It's about choices, not about what's right or wrong. I choose one method or food, you choose another - for whatever reasons. Cooking isn't all or nothing - all scratch, all convenience, but combinations of those... I purchase anything I want, I just stay within my $50/week budget. I buy grain instead of bread. You purchase whole wheat bread, I took it to the next step to control the ingredients even more and make bread at home. I mill my own flour because that's the only way I'm assured the freshest flour possible and all the nutrients FROM wholegrain flour. It's about nutrition first for me. It's also cheaper to mill your own flour at home - especially if you're like me and make ALL your baked goods at home. I use a wide variety of grains/seeds/beans as the basis of our diet. I started milling my own flour and baking everything to eliminate trans-fats, chemical ingredients and artifical colors. Living in the middle of wheat country, I occasionally get free wheat from cousins or friends, and that's really cost effective. Why not just purchase whole wheat flour...? Much of the commercial whole wheat flour is nothing more than white flour with some of the bran raked back into it to make it "brown" AND you pay more for it. By law, in some cases, the wheat germ must be removed in order to give the whole wheat flour longer shelf life. Once the bran on wheat is cracked, the bran oil quickly oxidizes from exposure to oxygen. Even if you were to be able to purchase whole wheat flour milled from 100% of the grain, the nutrients quickly degrade and the germ oil goes rancid (rancid oils do not have to SMELL rancid to BE rancid - if they smell rancid, they've been rancid a l-o-n-g time). What you get with all commercial whole wheat flour is "old" flour, degraded oil and nutrients because you have no idea when it was milled or what conditions it was stored and warehoused under. 6. I try to stick to whole foods and raw foods as much as possible, but I'm not a complete throw-back to a by-gone era. I'm not that ambitious (LOL). You couldn't pay me to gut and pick a chicken, nor would I like to to raise them, but I did all that when I was growing up. Whole foods are easy to prepare, usually cheaper (because they are less processed), more filling and have more fiber than processed foods. 7. I've made lots of peanut butter in a food processor from purchased roasted peanuts. It's one of those easy things people just don't realize they can do at home, but unless you grow your own peanuts, peanut butter is probably less expensive than buying peanuts. 8. We don't use mayo, but I make a "sorta mayo" from drained kefir curd when I need to hold tuna salad or something together. You can do the same thing with yogurt. I also make salad dressing because I try to avoid soy products of any kind, as well as high-fructose corn syrup, which are in almost everything. I make 6-8 cups of kefir each week, but I don't make cheese. I've made cheese (just for the experience of the process), and for the small amount of cheese we use, it's more cost effective to purchase it. I've never used or needed ricotta cheese, but I'd probably drain kefir and use it. I buy mustard, catsup, don't use canned veggies, purchase frozen fruit/veggies when necessary, make freezer jam, but use very little of foods that have empty calories or lots of sugar. I have a flaker mill, so I flake my own grains. I occasionally purchase old-fashioned oats, but make my own cracked grains, so I make my own Scotch (steel-cut) oats. I also mill my own cereals - cream-of-wheat, cream-of-rice... 9. If I don't - or can't - grow an herb/spice, I purchase it, but I grow the majority of what I use. I buy vanilla. I grow many herbs indoors - they are an easy-to-use, high-in-nutrition, fresh vegetable source in the winter. It's also a nice hobby. Garlic is easy to grow, as are onions. 10. The fats I use I purchase - butter, coconut oil, and a small amount of olive oil. I'd make butter if I had a good source for raw dairy products, but I don't. Gas to go get raw milk/cream is more expensive than buying butter at the store. Kansas law - you have to purchase it at the point of origin - the farm it's produced from. 11. We don't use a lot of pasta, but I make most of the pasta we consume and use freshly-milled durum flour. Pasta is cheap and easy to make. I have a pasta machine which makes the work quick, consistant, and accurate. For instance, I only need to make egg noodles once or twice a year because I make so many at once. I make a large batch, dehydrate them, and vacuum-seal them with a FoodSaver and the jar attachment in canning jars. Fresh spaghetti only takes a few minutes to make. Freeze the extra. Cleaning the pasta machine is what takes all the time (LOL). 12. We also consume a rather spartan amount of food compared to most people. We follow the old Basic-4, and I'm a stickler for serving sizes. Because we use whole foods, I'm sure we feel fuller consuming less food because it's less processed and higher in nutrition. "Hunger" is often a sign of malnutrition (need for nutrients), not lack of food. We also enjoy going out to eat. We just don't do it as often as many people do. We also like "junk" food, we just don't waste food dollars on it. If we want hamburgers and French fries, they can be easily made at home. I make the multi-grain burger buns. I bake the fries, rather than deep frying. Here's the old Basic-4 we follow: Bread/Cereal Group: 4 servings Fruits & Vegetables: 4 or more servings Meat/Meat Alternative: 2 servings Dairy or Dairy Alternative: 2 servings 13. Snacks are fresh, frozen, and dehydrated fruits; dehydrated zucchini replaces potato chips. We like nuts, air-popped popcorn, homemade granola... 14. Home canning is an example of something I DON'T do (although I have canned and have taught canning classes). It's more expensive to do home canning than it is to purchase those 3 jars of pickled beets and one jar of dill pickles I use a year. Most of the food from our garden gets eaten quickly, while fresh, or preserved in the freezer or dehydrated. Dried tomato powder quickly replaces tomato sauce or tomato paste. 15. Over the years I've invested in "tools". I won $500 in a low-glycemic recipe contest and bought some of them with the winnings. Just like having good tools for ANY job - building tools or for gardening - good tools makes work easier, more consistant, or more efficient. I've chosen kitchen tools for that same reason. Most have quickly paid for themselves because I use them all the time. I mill flour 1-3 times a week. I have "tools" you probably don't have, but you may also have "tools" I DON'T have. I don't have a jumbo stand mixer. I've never needed one. I use a mandoline, but it's a quick way to make slices for dehydrating very thin and all the same thickness, you may not have one. I have several mills because one mill doesn't do everything. BTW - We have a Neuton battery-powered mower, but also designed our small yard to be very low-maintanance with less than 25% in grass. We water with rain water from our 1000-gallons in the rain barrels around the house. I don't like the emotionally charged, guilt-ridden "green". It's such a catch word these days so that companies can charge you more, or make you feel guilty for making a different choice. I've always prefered a simpler way to get the same results. Usually those ways are also going to save money, even though you may have to invest money up front before you see the savings. Rain water is free, but the containers, hoses and diverters cost money. We saved more than they cost after 2 summers. I cook in solar ovens. Yes, they cost, but so does cooking with electricity or gas. After enough time, the solar ovens have paid for themselves over and over again. It's all about choices. Not about what's right or wrong. -Grainlady