Mad scientist at work

This morning I got excited about an idea in the shower.

I always think in the shower, and today I was considering potential menus for a dinner with friends tomorrow night. I want to make more danish pastry, and I was thinking of something like salmon danish with a mushroom sauce that would play off the cardamom in the danish dough. Then I thought of incorporating mushrooms into the danish dough itself. And suddenly, I remembered that Chef had made a sourdough starter this week with mushrooms as the yeast source, and it occurred to me that I might be able to make a mushroom danish with no other yeast! (This is the exciting idea.)

I was dubious that just making the dough with mushrooms in it would seed it with enough live yeast for the dough to work, and time was too short for a regular sourdough starter to mature. Fortunately, its being a true sourdough danish isn’t really the point: it would be enough to have a healthy mushroom-yeast population to pitch into the dough. So to that end I made a small mushroom-sourdough starter, which won’t be mature but should contain a healthy yeast population when I need it. We’ll see how it goes!