Sourdough Starter

My most recent sourdough starter at 2 days old

Making a sourdough starter is a commitment. It can be fun, provide plenty of scope for experimentation, and can lead to spectacular results. Sometimes.

At other times it can be frustrating, annoying and feel like a drain on your time. Just like any other commitment.

Once you make a sourdough starter, it is alive. Or, more accurately, you make an environment that is just right for things that are already alive: yeasts and bacteria. You build them a home, make it enticing, and they move in. It’s then up to you to nurture the starter, and everything it contains. If you do not, it will die.

Why?

So, why would anyone choose to make and care for a sourdough starter. You may want a sourdough starter because:

  • You have no yeast
  • You want to make lots of bread regularly (at least weekly)
  • You love the taste, texture and smell of sourdough bread
  • You want to make other sourdough based things (pancakes, crumpets, flatbreads, soups – so many possibilities)
  • You’re feeling creative and you like a challenge
  • You love learning from trying things out and sometimes seeing them not quite go as you intended
  • You want to use natural yeasts in your food to treat your tummy and its microbiome
  • You want to save money and use more of your own time preparing food

You’ll need

Patience

A home for your sourdough starter:

  • I use a 1 litre lidded glass jar with the rubber seal removed because the starter is alive and needs to breathe (Le Parfait, Kilner, IKEA and the supermarkets all have them).
  • Anything that can contain liquids with a removable top and that will not be airtight. An old plastic container with holes in the lid could work

Flour:

  • Organic and the least processed the better. You do not want pesticides and other treatments lingering in your sourdough starter for years to come (if you stick with it) and inhibiting the growth of natural yeasts. You do not want to consume what non-organic industrial farming adds to crops.
  • Rye is the classic and great. Stoneground wholemeal flour also works well. Wholemeal spelt works (my most recent starter was fed this for the first couple of weeks). Strong white flour may work at a push, although it may be a bit like junk food to the yeasts, providing a quick rush and running out quickly. I’ve not tried making a starter from white flour.

Starting your starter

250g of flour

Warm water

Put the flour in the jar, stir in enough warm (around 35ºC) water to make a thick paste. Give it a vigorous stir to incorporate air.

Set it aside for 24 hours with the lid over and not clipped or sealed so that there is plenty of air circulation without risk of the starter drying out. Keep it warm rather than cool. It will probably start to breath after 12 hours or so, producing some carbon dioxide. This is a good thing.

Next day, remove and discard half of the contents and replace with a roughly equivalent volume of flour and warm water, stirring vigorously again. Set aside for 24 hours.

Next day, remove and discard another half of the contents and replace with a roughly equivalent volume of flour and warm water, stirring vigorously again. Set aside for 24 hours.

If things are looking lively now, with lots of bubbly activity in the jar, then have a good smell. Is it smelling acidic, beery and sour? If so, this is also a good thing and you could try to make something with it. If not, repeat the remove & replace steps and set aside for another 24 hours. It can take a week to get going.

How to use it

Make bread!

This is my current base recipe:

  1. Mix: Take between 150g to 250g or starter, mix with 320g warm (around 35ºC) water, then add and mix in 530g flour(s). It will be a sticky, sloppy pile.
    I find that the lower the proportion of strong white flour, the sloppier the dough and less able it is to hold itself up. I either get rather low loaves (if I bake straight onto a sheet), or I bake in a tin. I don’t actually mind the low loaves (slices look like biscotti in extreme cases); others may be expecting more altitude, which is where tins can help. I like using a round loose-bottomed cake tin.
    For flour, options include:
    • all white (organic strong white)
    • 100g organic rye + 430g organic strong white;
    • 100g rye, 100g wholemeal, 330g white
  2. Rest (autolyse) for 30-45 minutes
  3. Add salt: around 9 grammes sea salt crystals (2 level teaspoons) works for me. Some like it saltier.
  4. Fold: in the bowl (or on the worktop if you’re okay with the sticky mess) bring the part of the dough furthest away towards you, folding over itself. Turn the bowl 90º and repeat. Do this 16 times.
  5. Rest for 30-45 minutes
  6. Fold and rest for 30-45 minutes
  7. Fold and rest for 30-45 minutes
  8. Fold and rest for 30-45 minutes (you can repeat this another couple of times to improve the texture and strength of the dough)
  9. Shape and transfer to proving basket or the baking tin if you’re going that way
  10. Leave until risen (2 hours and up to 4 hours+ depending on temperature vitality of your starter and, well, pretty much anything else)
  11. Bake now or keep in the fridge overnight, removing at least 2 hours before baking if you want more rise
  12. Baking:
    1. 10 mins on hottest (240-250ºC)
    2. Then 15-20 mins on 220ºC. You know your oven best. If it’s fan with a top temp of 220º you may need to go for more like 30-40 mins.

Caring for your starter

Once you have an active starter, you need to keep it going. Like any living organism, your starter needs constant nurturing.

Each day, remove approximately half of the starter and either use it or discard it. Top the starter up with flour and warm water. Remember to keep the consistency thick and gloopy. Close the jar and leave it for 24 hours, or until you need it.

Storing for longer

If you know that you won’t need any starter for a few days, place it in the fridge after feeding. You can keep it there for a few days with no further feeding needed (up to a week, in my experience). If you need to store it for longer, simply discard half and feed it after 5-7 days.

When you need to use it, take it out, discard half and feed it. Once it has woken up, it will start to feed on the fresh flour and release carbon dioxide bubbles. This typically happens after 1-4 hours. Once it has peaked and started to fall again, use it.

Questions and problems

I have a layer of murky liquid at the top of the starter

This has happened lots to me. Usually it’s just because I used too much water or not enough flour. Go thicker. Add more flour, stir vigorously and wait a few hours (up to 24) to see if it looks better.

When is the best time to use the sourdough starter?

When the yeasts are ready to be fed again. This is any time just after your starter has peaked (bubbled up to its highest point today) and started to fall again.

Take what you need now and feed it by starting to make bread. Don’t forget to feed the family left behind with the mother.

Historical context

I’ll come back and read this again one day in the distant future. I’ll wonder why I felt the need to share my thoughts and experiences of sourdough starter, and why at this time.

Richard Warnett, Sunday 03 May 2020

It’s May 2020. The world is in the midst of the COVID-19 Coronavirus pandemic. The East has started to get things under control. Europe is showing early signs that the number of new cases will fall each day. Further West, the USA and Americas probably still have the worse to come. Here, in the UK, we’re not doing well. It looks like we will have more deaths and possibly more cases than any country other than the USA.

We’re in lockdown. Officially started on 24 March 2020 in the UK, in our home we’ve effectively been voluntarily locked-down from around 13 March 2020. The combination of being home-bound every day, the panic buying and hoarding of food, and the supply chain shortages that followed has led us to want to be more creative and depend on others a little less. Many others around the world have responded in similar ways.

Once specific response has been a surge in the interest in home made sourdough. Because we all want to ensure we can put bread on the table, literally, and because one of the first foods to disappear from the shops was dried yeast (along with flour), sourdough quickly became a solution.