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Long Term Preservation of Sourdough Starter
The 18th Century English used barm, the top fermenting yeast froth from brewing Ale, to make bread. In fact, bakers where required by law to use only barm for bread and the English preferred the mild flavor that it produced anyway. In France, barm was, by law, not used for bread making. Leven (‘old dough”) was required by law and the French preferred the sourdough’s complex flavor. Here is a recipe from the Colonial times for preserving Leven (Sourdough Starter).
Preservation of Sourdough Starter
· When a batch of dough was ready to begin rising, a ½ cup size ball was pinched off to preserve for future use, usually 10 days but often longer.
· The ball of dough was pressed into a bowl shape which was filled with salt. Then the entire ball of dough was buried in salt which dries it out to a hard brittle lump to be used later as needed.
Bringing the Sourdough Starter Back to Life
· To wake up the salted dough starter, carefully scrape off the salt crust and chop the ball into fine pieces. To these pieces, add 1 cup of warm water and stir until dissolved. Strain through cheese cloth to remove pieces of crust which should yield about ¾ cup of liquid. To this add 1 ½ cup of flour to make a soupy mixture, cover and let sit overnight in a warm place until it forms a bubbly sponge.
· To make bread, add 2 teaspoons of salt to 3 cups of flour and mix. Next, add 1 cup of starter and 1 cup of warm water. Mix well then kneed until soft and smooth. When the batch of dough is ready to begin rising, pinched off a ½ cup size ball to act as a starter for the next baking.
Simple Drying
· Ready the sourdough starter for storage by feeding it with equal parts unbleached flour and lukewarm water then let it rest, covered, until it becomes very bubbly.
· Spread it out to dry onto baking sheet covered with plastic or parchment and dry completely until brittle for several days at room temperature or in a dehydrator at its very lowest setting. The dry brittle starter should peel off easily and should be broken into small chips or pulverize with a small mallet.
· Store the dried starter in an airtight labeled canning jar, a cool, but not refrigerated, dark place.
Bringing the Sourdough Starter Back to Life
· To bring the sourdough starter back to life, measure out 1 ounce (1/4 to 1/3 cup) of the dried chips. Mix the dried starter in a pint container with 2 oz (¼ cup) of lukewarm water, tamp it down so that the water barely covers the chips and occasionally stir for about 3 hours or until the chips dissolve.
· Once the mixture is fairly smooth, feed with 1 ounce (about 1/4 cup) of unbleached flour then cover it lightly and place it somewhere warm to rest for 1 or 2 days until it bubbles. Then feed the starter again with 1 ounce of lukewarm water and 1 ounce of flour then cover it and put back in its warm spot until it is vigorously bubbling again. Feed the starter one more time 1 ounce of lukewarm water and 1 ounce of flour then recover and wait until it is vigorously bubbling again and is ready for use.
· Vacuum sealed, this dried starter stock has been known to store 9 years become active within 24 hours and ready for use in 2 days. Stored in Mylar with oxygen absorbers, it should last even longer.
Dick Heller Transformed Gun-Rights Law—and He's Not Finished
His Supreme Court case paved the way for hundreds of guns-rights lawsuits in America—but in Washington, D.C., he’s still waging war.
One Friday morning in July 2008, Washington, D.C., security guard Dick Heller headed to police headquarters on an errand that he had been planning for the better part of 15 years. Three weeks earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court had made its historic Second Amendment decision in District of Columbia v. Heller. Now Heller set out to do what no one in D.C. had been allowed to do before he won the case: register a handgun for self-protection.
Afterward, Heller tried gamely to put a positive spin on what had just transpired, but there was no hiding his frustration. “We’re still working out the procedure of how much the government needs to regulate the citizens’ rights,” he noted ruefully.
A reporter asked, “It’s been a long time coming for you, sir. Are you encouraged?” Heller forced a smile. “It’s been a long battle,” he stated flatly.
For scholars of constitutional law, there is no questioning the momentous change Heller wrought. “We live in a world where, in part because of Heller, every single American has the right to own a gun in their own home for self defense,” says Adam Winkler, the UCLA constitutional law professor whose book, Gunfight, chronicled the Heller case. “His lawsuit paved the way for literally hundreds of other lawsuits. So I think his influence has really been quite huge.”
For the gun lobby and its Republican allies, preserving the victory they were handed via Heller has become a rallying point in every Supreme Court nomination fight that has taken place since. Now that President Barack Obama has picked federal judge Merrick Garland to replace Justice Antonin Scalia, author of the Heller decision, the National Rifle Association has used the centrist jurist’s ambiguous views on gun rights to declare him unacceptable for confirmation—a reminder of how far it will go to protect the gains delivered by his case.
But don’t try venerating Heller to Dick Heller himself. As his failed mission at the D.C. police station vividly illustrated, the ruling was not quite the sweeping gun-freedom victory he and many others had first thought. Instead, the win was just a single turning point in an all-out war with the precedent that had governed the regulation of guns in America for centuries.
He has spent the last seven years sparring in court with the District of Columbia over an evolving list of gun regulations authorities enacted that were designed to minimally comply with the ruling that bears his name. Over that time, he has grown increasingly disillusioned over the intransigence of courts and legislators, a frustration that has brought his anti-government views bubbling to the surface. Asked to serve as the Rosa Parks of the gun-rights movement, he’s come to embody something else: a belief, now dominant in gun-rights circles, that Heller didn’t go nearly far enough to abolish gun regulations once and for all.
Supported by Heller’s pay as a security guard, vonBreichenruchardt served as Heller’s constitutional muse and a “handler of sorts,” according to Reasonmagazine’s Brian Doherty’s history of the case, Gun Control on Trial. Living across the street from a public housing project’s open-air drug peddling and gunplay, the two in 1996 started the U.S. Bill of Rights Foundation, which vonBreichenruchardt ran as a vehicle to advance his wide-ranging libertarian views on small government, the gold standard, and guns.
Heller carried a gun at work, but—because of D.C.’s then 20-year-old gun ban—had to leave it there when he returned home each day. In 2002, vonBreichenruchardt devised a plan that would lay the groundwork for a lawsuit: Heller would go through the futile gesture of applying for a gun permit as a way to document the practical impossibility of keeping a gun for home protection in the district.
Around the same time, the Cato Institute’s Robert Levy was preparing a legal attack on the D.C. law, a case he would personally finance and run with a band of fellow libertarian lawyers. They needed plaintiffs. Instead of the usual litigants that challenged gun restrictions on Second Amendment grounds—people charged with gun crimes—Levy and his co-counsel sought media-friendly, law-abiding D.C. residents to serve as the public face of their case.
On the surface, Heller seemed the perfect plaintiff to carry the legal challenge. But the lawyers worried about his zealous anti-government views and his penchant for riffing on the supposed similarities between the D.C. government and Russia. Levy was concerned that, in Doherty’s words, Heller seemed like “a clichéd vision of the sort of person obsessed with his gun rights.” And so, “Dick’s role as the named plaintiff was not what was intended,” as Levy recalled in a recent interview.
Four years into the litigation, Parker and four other original plaintiffs were dropped from the case because they lacked legal standing, meaning they hadn’t suffered enough of an “injury,” in technical terms, to file suit. Heller, meanwhile, still held the trump card that vonBreichenrucharft had engineered: the denied gun permit. That was enough to sue. Parker v. D.C. was renamed Heller v. D.C., with Dick Heller as the sole plaintiff.
The case still faced other hurdles. Early on, lawyers for the NRA—fearing pro-gun forces lacked enough votes to convince a Supreme Court majority that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to bear arms—tried to talk Levy out of pursuing the case. They then attempted to dissuade him from using as his lead lawyer an untested sole practitioner, Alan Gura. Doubting Heller’s prospects, the NRA filed a competing suit, Seegars v. Ashcroft, helmed by a leading Second Amendment advocate, Stephen Halbrook.
The NRA’s concerns were strategic, but Levy says now that something else was going on. “I think the real concern was that three lawyers from outside the NRA started stepping on some toes, and the NRA wasn’t appreciative,” he says.
During the Supreme Court oral arguments in Heller, Gura claimed the court could secure gun rights for individuals while still allowing for certain restrictions, such as a machine gun ban. Gura’s concession—followed by language in Scalia’s majority opinion that “nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt” on longstanding regulations such as restrictions on felons “or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms”—realigned the spectrum of gun-rights advocates. Gura had spent the previous five years racing past the NRA, fueled by a belief that they could upend centuries of law. But even that brash position paled in comparison with the radicalism of absolutists, and now Gura and his associates found themselves to the left of hard-line advocates.
Gura did not respond to requests for comment. But in Winkler’s book, he’s quoted as dismissing the “crazy” extremists who wanted him to do more to avoid the kind of compromises that now serve as justification for preserving gun regulations under Heller. “That would have probably made me very popular in some cabin somewhere out there in the woods,” he said, but he would have lost the case.
“The Heller attorneys, Gura and associates, were not that eager to pursue just a pedal-to-the-metal constitutional case,” says Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America, a group that prides itself on its absolutist stance on gun rights. Heller, Pratt adds, is “someone who really gets” the Second Amendment. “In the end if we don’t defend the fundamental principle, as Heller himself seems to prefer to do, we end up settling for less than what we want.”
Heller at first had no intention of settling for less. Much in demand as a speaker at gun shows and other events, he vowed to make the most of his newfound ability to speak his mind, promising a campaign to expand gun rights and other freedoms.
Soon after the decision, in 2008, he created the Heller Foundation—paired with vonBreichenruchardt’s U.S. Bill of Rights Foundation—to promote “a world where arms and self defense rights are considered as essential to human life as food and water.” Neither nonprofit makes its financial records available, so it’s difficult to discern the extent of their activities. According to an infrequently updated Heller Foundation website—which is oddly adorned with cheesecake photos of young, gun-toting women—Heller’s only litigation outside of the D.C. case is in a Dallas lawsuit challenging federal machine-gun regulations. In that case, he signed on to an amicus brief filed by Pratt’s GOA that called machine guns “the lineal descendants of founding-era firearms” fulfilling the ultimate purpose of the Second Amendment, “to allow the people to take up effective arms against a tyrant.” A district judge’s dismissal of that suit now awaits a ruling by the 5th Circuit.
Meanwhile, his post-Heller outspokenness has only confirmed Gura and Co’s rationale for muzzling him while the suit played out. He has equated Second Amendment advocacy with opposing “socialist Obamacare.” He has made a joint endorsement with vonBreichenruchardt of a minimal-government utopia of “liberty-loving people” in New Hampshire. And one element of his foundation’s “vision” is to rail against the “enemies of humanity” who “believe in a centralized synarchy,” a favored conspiracy-theorist term for government by a secret elite.
But not all of his crusades have been so quixotic. He filed a lawsuit against Washington, D.C. in July 2008, shortly after his disappointing encounter with the handgun-registration bureaucrats. The so-called Heller II suit challenges the regulations D.C. lawmakers put in place following the ruling in Heller I.
The case has been far more time-consuming than Heller expected. After parting ways with Gura and Levy, Heller enlisted as his lawyer Stephen Halbrook, the same Second Amendment expert whom the NRA hired to try to block the initial Heller. After a seven-year slog, punctuated by the D.C. government’s multiple changes to its gun regulations, Halbrook last September managed to win a D.C. Circuit panel’s ruling invalidating four of the 10 restrictions Heller challenged, a ruling that stood with last month’s decision by the full appeals court not to rehear the case. Halbrook and Heller have not signaled if they will seek Supreme Court review.
(read the rest at)
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/03/why-the-man-who-transformed-gun-rights-still-isnt-satisfied/474708/
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