“Starting” Out in Sourdough!

Do you have any neighbors or friends who are into making sourdough goodies? If so then definitely consider asking them for guidance and a bit of their sourdough starter. If not, I'll be your friendly neighbor today and share some of my sourdough knowledge. 

You can make your own starter but ideally, you want to bake with a very mature one that’s been alive for a long time, and constantly fed. Sourdough baking will take time to get used to! You're not going to have the perfect loaf for a while, but every loaf you make is hand-made by you with love and it’s edible bread! That should inspire you to make more and more until sourdough becomes more of a therapeutic art to you.

 

To make your own

You’ll need:

1 jar

Scale (not necessary but always better in baking)

60 g or ½ cup of whole wheat flour (high in protein if possible)

60g or 1/4 cup of purified warm water 

 

You’ll mix that together and each day you’ll feed it 60 g of flour or ½ cup of flour and 60 g of water or ¼ cup 

 

I recommend mixing all-purpose flour or bread flour and rye, with a higher amount of all-purpose flour than rye. 

 

Here is a schedule for you to follow with your starter:

 

Day 1- You’ll make your starter, and your consistency is going to be super thick since there's a lot of protein in the whole wheat flour. You can use a little more water to thin out your mixture if you'd like but it's not necessary. After a while feeding your starter will become a lot more about consistency and smell. Your consistency should be like a muffin batter so a little thicker than pancake batter. You’ll want to set your starter somewhere warm like the top of your turned-off oven but not in front of a burning hot window sill. 

 

Day 2- you're not going to do anything as far as feeding your starter, you don't even have to mix it. You’ll see a brown liquid over the top building in your starter called hooch. Some People like to mix that in and others discard it. When your starter is mature you’ll definitely want to discard the hooch, but for now, you won’t do anything about it on day 2. 

 

Day 3- you might have bubbles now but it doesn't matter much because you’ll feed your starter again. You’ll get rid of half your starter and feed it another 60 g of flour and 60g of water. 

You can add a little bit of commercial yeast or caraway seeds to help the yeast develop, this will help speed up the process but it’s not necessary. 

 You’ll continue this feeding process for 3 more days. 

 

Day 7- by this time your starter should be quite bubbly, and almost doubling in size when you feed it. I recommend not using your new starter for at least 3 weeks, if not a month. You can test if your starter is ready by dropping a tiny bit of your starter in water and seeing if it floats, this isn’t always accurate but if your starter floats it means it's airy which is good. Your starter will have more bubbles if you use a higher protein flour. 

 

Feeding your starter regularly:

 After the first week’s cycle I start to feed it once a week or so, but if you are planning on being a regular baker keep feeding daily and keep it covered at room temp. If you aren’t planning on using it regularly then keep it covered in the fridge until feeding time. Feeding your starter doesn't have to be rocket science. Ideally, you just want a one-to-one ratio or 100% hydration.

 

What this means is there are equal parts flour and water which is just the classic hydration level for sourdough, but you can have different levels of hydration as you improve and experiment. 

 

I have several starters going in big 32 oz jars which I’ll link to right here. I like to discard about half and since I make a lot of bread that leaves me with 150 g of starter so I use 150 g of a mix of rye and all-purpose flour and 150g of water. 

 

Most people will want 50g of starter, 50g of flour, and 50g of water. 

 

I feed my starter and bake my bread on set days each week so there can be a consistent schedule. 

 

I feed my starter the night before I want to use it in recipes. 

 

There are many bread recipes, here’s a link to one of my favorites. 

 

Congrats! You’ve passed your intro to sourdough!