Daily Learnings: Wed, Jun 26, 2024
Sourdough Starter Maintenance Updates
Over the past month (in between some travel), I’ve been experimenting with building and maintaining a sourdough starter differently than I have in the past. I’ve been baking with sourdough for almost 10yrs at this point, and had subscribed mostly to the methods that are presented in the book Flour Salt Water Yeast (often called FSWY online). This book is written by Ken Forkish, a baker that runs a fantastic bakery called Ken’s Artisan in Portland (which I’ve visited, and it truly is excellent).
In FSWY, Ken outlines a pretty simple method for starting and maintaining a starter, which he often referred to as a levain. Simplifying a bit, essentially the method is that you build the levain, and that you take a portion directly from the levain to use in baking. In other words, your starter is the leaven with which you bake bread, or other goods. Many other sources online or in other books produced by commercial, artisan bakers supported this method. When I reviewed Tartine Bread, it implicitly confirmed the method that Ken Forkish teaches, considering your starter and leaven as one.
When I recently started reading For the Love of Sourdough, I was really surprised to see a different method for starter maintenance presented, one that I honestly thought was overly complicated. However, as I experimented, I realized the value in it.
Basically, the authors introduce a separation of the starter and leaven. To be more clear, here’s a definition of these terms as the book says:
- Starter: The culture that you feed and maintain day-to-day
- Leaven: The portion of natural yeast, built from your starter, that you use in your baking
The book recommended that you build and maintain your starter using a REALLY small amount of flour and water, and that you also only use white flour for feeds. Then, when you’re ready to bake, you take a portion of your starter discard, put it into a separate container, add a larger amount of flour (white, whole wheat, whatever flour you’d like to achieve the flavor profile that you’d like in your bake) and water, mix and let rise to then use when ready in your bake.
Initially this was confusing to me, and I didn’t understand why someone would have these separations, but then I realized some massive benefits to this method that solved some pains that I was experiencing, that I had just accepted:
- This really cuts down on the amount of flour that you have to use in maintaining your starter
- Further, from a small starter, you can dynamically create leaven for 1 or more loafs in a given bake
- By maintaining your starter with just white flour, your discard is a lot more versatile to use in different discard recipes
- This was actually quite a relief for me, as I usually make my leavens pretty stiff and higher in whole-wheat ratio to get a stronger “sour” flavor profile. But discard of this flavor is REALLY present when used in other recipes, which can be off-putting or entirely not reasonable.
Based on these learnings, I’m going to try and take some time to update my entry on Creating a Sourdough Starter, as my thoughts on how to build and maintain a starter have really changed. Further, there are some other things that I’ve learned along the way from my own experiments and from For the Love of Sourdough.