Creating a Sourdough Starter

EDIT: Updates in 2024

I originally wrote this entry in 2020. However, as outlined in my thoughts here, my feelings on building and maintaining a starter have changed through further reading and experimenting. I’ve updated this entry to be more in line with these updated thoughts.

Intro

I’ve been baking bread with a sourdough starter since about 2016. When I first started, I kept pretty close to the recipes and techniques listed in the book Flour Water Salt Yeast (FWSY), by Ken Forkish. Following Ken’s advice as outlined in his book, I made some pretty great bread. However, after doing it for about a year, I decided to start to experiment with some changes.

Unfortunately, in my experiments I didn’t make very good bread. Some of this was attributed to moving to a different state/city, having to learn how to deal with city water, and variations in humidity. Regardless, these failures encouraged me to learn more about the process, and figure out what I was doing wrong. Ultimately, I wanted to gain more baking intuition. After working at it, reading more books, watching a ton of YouTube, and experimenting with different makeups of a sourdough starter, I was able to learn some things that I felt weren’t adequately communicated in other blogs, forums, and YouTube videos. That, or I was just too hard-headed, and needed to experience bad outcomes to learn.

Much of my technique today (June 2024) is more in line with the methods proposed in For the Love of Sourdough, which I feel presents techniques more conducive to home-baking. I recommend reading this book and many others too!

Important Terminology

Starter: The small culture that you feed and maintain day-to-day
Leaven: The portion of natural yeast, built from your starter, that you use in your actual baking

Thoughts on Flour

The type of flour that you choose to use is definitely important. I try and buy local, and as natural (organic) as I can. However, that’s not necessary to make good bread (in my experience). Here are some guiding principles to keep in mind, though, when you’re baking or feeding your starter.

For white flour, do not use bleached, enriched flour. This one is important. When bleached, the flour loses a ton of nutritional value, as well as some of the live yeast that you’ll need to build a strong starter
- Just buy White, all-purpose, unbleached flour
When baking bread, “bread flour” is actually nice to use, as it helps to form stronger gluten faster, with less strenuous kneading
When feeding your starter, you don’t need to use “bread flour”. You can just use white, all-purpose flour
King Arthur is a good flour to get, if you have access to a store that sells it, and if it’s not too pricey in your area. They have great all-purpose, bread, and whole wheat flours that are high-quality.

Tools Needed

Before diving into my recipe, here are some tools that I assume you’ll have:

A container large enough to store your starter. This can be a tupperware, a mason jar, or whatever. You’ll just want to assume that it needs to be a bit bigger than you initially think, since it will grow and shrink as it’s active and feeding.
- I personally use a large-mouth 2quart tub, so I can mix with my hands.
A food-scale. This is definitely a must. All my ratios are in grams, and that makes it super easy to change, while maintaining the right proportions. Also, measuring my volume is inherently more error-prone.

My Sourdough Recipe

I’ve settled on this ratio of flours and water, but you can experiment.

50g previous starter (see the Technique section below for more on this)
250g 50/50 mix of unbleached white flour & whole wheat flour
180g water at 75º F

This will result in enough starter (once it’s active and ready) to make two nice-sized loaves at once. If this is too much, or you don’t want to maintain this much starter, feel free to proportionately reduce the amounts. E.g.:

25g previous starter
125g 50/50 mix of unbleached white flour & whole wheat flour
90g water

Technique

If you follow FWSY, there’s a great guide to starting a sourdough culture that I highly recommend. However, I have deviated from it a bit. Here’s a super brief overview on how to make your starter, assuming that you’re feeding the starter every night before bed.

First Night

Weigh your container empty, and note it. You’ll need to memorize this, or at least reference this weight every day you feed your starter after this first night.
Mix dry ingredients in your container
Mix in water till incorporated and there are no more dry spots
- Note: Since this is the first night, you won’t have any “previous starter” to mix in
Cover and leave on the counter overnight

Second Night

Throw away all but 150g of your previous starter
- This is why you need to measure your container empty. If you know that it weighs 233g, then you know it should weigh 383g with 150g of previous starter
- Note: This varies from the actual recipe above where you only keep 50g of previous starter. This is on purpose. It’s to help the starter build up in the early days.
Dump in dry ingredients
Dump in water
Mix until well-incorporated
Cover and leave on the counter overnight

Third Night

Repeat the steps from the Second Night

Fourth Night

During the day, prior to feeding it, you should notice that it’s starting to rise and fall on a bit of a schedule. Check out the container in the morning sometime and verify that it’s grown in size compared to the previous night.

If it has, ignore the reduction to 100g of previous starter listed below, and keep 150g of previous starter.

Repeat the steps from the Second Night, with one difference:
- This time, reduce the amount of previous starter to 100g

Fifth Night

If you’re seeing a solid rise and fall throughout the day of your starter, you’ve done it! By day 5 you should be good to go and ready to bake.

Repeat the steps from the Second Night, only reduce the previous starter to 50g

Maintaining your Starter

After you’ve gotten the starter… started (?), you can move into maintenance mode. Follow the same steps in the Technique section above, only use the ratios listed in the original recipe.

Controversial Opinion

When maintaining your starter, it’s common for some to ask if they can pop it in the fridge and not have to feed it every day. The answer to this question is definitely yes!. However, and here’s my opinion that might be controversial, I don’t recommend doing this till you’ve gone about a month of nightly feedings to really get the starter in a good groove.

This recommendation is only influenced by my experience in creating 4 starters in 2 different states. I found that after about a month of nightly feedings, your starter is [hopefully] active and strong enough to come out of hibernation strong and ready to bake.

Note: If you put your starter in the fridge, plan for removing it and feeding it nightly for 2-3 days prior to baking with it. This will help to activate it and get it up to peak performance before leavening bread (or pancakes, or whatever).

What do I do with my Sourdough Starter Discard?

It’s initially really weird to discard the majority of your starter every night before feeding; however, it’s important to do so. Basically, a starter is a delicate balance of wild yeast and natural bacteria. The more bacteria (which basically is in the leftover after a feeding cycle), the less yeast in the starter, and the hard time it will have leavening bread.

This is a huge simplification; much smarter people than me have explained the science behind a starter. I recommend you go and read more on this elsewhere.

But here’s the question: “Do I have to just throw it away?” And the answer to that is No! You can do a number of different things with the discard. Here are just a couple of ideas:

Fry it up in a pan with some oil, salt, and pepper and eat a savory pancake (good for the tum tum too!)
Use it in some overnight english muffin dough, pancake/waffle batter, etc…
- There are a ton of recipes online for this

Guiding Principles for Flavor Profiles

Here are some important principles when it comes to getting the right flavor that you’re looking for in your bakes:

Important Note: These principles are really more important to consider when creating your leaven, not when maintaining your starter

The more whole-wheat flour you use in your leaven, the stronger the “sour” flavor it will impart to your bread
- Conversely, the more white flour, the more “buttery” the bread
The colder the water used when creating your leaven, the the stronger the “sour” flavor in your bread
- Conversely, the warmer the water, the less strong
- Note: Keep the temperatures reasonable, though. I generally never drop below 75ºF, and never go above 95ºF.
The lower the hydration of the leaven (the more “stiff”), the stronger the “sour” flavor in your bread (also, the easier to mix by hand IMO).
- The higher the hydration (the more “wet”), the more “buttery” the bread
- Note: This is also important to keep in mind when mixing your final dough. If your leaven has a high hydration, it can throw off your hydration ratio for the final bread, making it more wet than expected.

Other Miscellaneous Learnings

There are some other important things that I’ve run into that caused some initial frustration or confusion. I hope that my bumps along the way can help clarify some things.

Why So Many Varying Sourdough Starter “Recipes”

There are tons of conflicting advice and recipes online about creating a wild yeast starter from scratch. When I first started to deviate from FWSY, I was super overwhelmed, thinking that there was only one “right” way to do things, and I just needed to learn the hidden technique to make it “right” way. I finally realized that there’s no “right” way, just different ways that ultimately result in different flavor profiles of your breads.

Water Quality / Type

My starter seemed active after day 2, but then stopped rising!

Final Notes

Here are some miscellaneous things to keep in mind:

Consistency is key. I’ll repeat this: Consistency is key. Feed your starter at the same time each day/night/whenever you choose your schedule. It really does help to create the sourdough starter’s cycle.
Try to time creating and then using your leaven in bakes when it’s close to its peak in the cycle
- If you’re feeding on a 24hr cycle, I’ve found this to be about 9hrs after the feeding

References

Daily Learnings: Wed, Jun 26, 2024