best place to put a sourdough starter to get the best flavor and wildyeast?

It's inside your flour sack.  The yeast and bacteria that you want to cultivate already rode in on the kernels of wheat and rye before they were ground into flour.  Far be it from me to say that one can't inoculate a culture with airborne spores, but there a lot more of the little buggers already in the flour.

So, use whole-grain flours for your nascent starter (wheat is good and rye is even better) and you'll be on your way.

Happy fermenting!

Paul

:)

I mean... Abread!

or Aloaf!

I asked Peter Reinhart about this once, because I, too, assumed the starter would catch the wild yeasts floating in the air. He gave me the same answer as Paul: the yeast spores cling to the flour.

Gone was my dream to be the creator of real "Bar Harbor Sourdough" - I guess it's a just a plain old Montana one...

Karin