Who wants to make a blob of guck that turns into bread?! I know. Everyone does. I mean, it's the year of Coronavirus where the two most popular things in the world are baking sourdough bread and thinking about baking sourdough bread. To do it, you need to know how to make sourdough starter.
If you already have sourdough starter and want to dry it (to preserve it) I have full instructions on how to dry sourdough starter here.
Sourdough starter hit its stride in the year ohhhhh 1500 BC or so. The Egyptians were all over it. For thousands of years it was the only way to make bread. Then something horrifying happened - progress.
With the invention of instant commercial yeast by Louis Pasteur in the 1800s, sourdough starter was abandoned by bakers.
Commercial yeast gave predictable results, was easier to use and a lot faster than the homemade levain people had been using for centuries. All but the most discriminating of bakers (the French) switched to using the commercial yeast.
What breads made with commercial yeast didn't have was the flavour of bread made with the traditional sourdough starter. But bakers were willing to give that taste up in exchange for convenience.
100 years after the invention of commercial yeast, around the 1980s, the popularity of sourdough starters began to rise again before levelling out in the 1990s.
Nobody (except every infectious disease expert around the world, plus that guy who made the movie Pandemic) could have predicted what would happen in the spring of 2020.
The entire world would shut down. And together we were alone.
Collectively, without prompting, the world knew what to do. We would bake bread.
The word "bread" spiked to an all time high in Google searches. This was partly because everyone locked inside their homes wanted to do and eat something that was comforting. What's more comforting than the smell of freshly baked bread and a warm hunk of it slathered in butter.
Even more explosive were the results for sourdough starter a week later when everyone started to realize yeast was suddenly sold out everywhere.
Overnight, sourdough starter and bread became the "it" thing. Nothing like this had happened since the Cabbage Patch doll riots of 1983.
Winter is coming again, the virus is in its second wave almost everywhere and even though you might not be in lock down, the safest place for you to be is at home.
So.
Who wants to make sourdough starter?
If you were alive and coherent in the 1980's you might remember the fad with people passing around a gross glop of dirty looking glue. You were supposed to take a bit out and pass along the rest to a bunch of unsuspecting friends. It was like a chain letter but with if someone accidentally sneezed on it, you were going to eat it. Blech.
THAT was sourdough starter.
Sourdough starters have been known to be passed on from generation to generation.
It's a mixture of flour and water that's been left to ferment and turn into liquid yeast. It does this by "catching" wild yeast that's in the air.
Sourdough starter, which makes bread rise, tastes different than regular yeast because it contains different yeasts and bacterias. It's fermented and has a slight sour taste to because of that. It's what gives sourdough the unique flavour it has.
O.K. NOW do you want to know how to make this miracle of nature that has you catching wild yeast from the air known as sourdough starter?
I thought you might.
By the way, catching wild yeast is a bit of a romanticism. You are in fact catching wild yeast, but yeast is pretty much in abundance everywhere. You know when grapes have that white haze on them? YEAST! Yup. The white haze on grapes is yeast.
Yeast is in the air, on your hands, and possibly on the spoon you use to stir your concoction. Which is lucky for we sourdough starter makers.
Before I get to the sourdough starter recipe I know you're going to have this question:
Table of Contents
What flour is best for sourdough starter.
What kind of flour? Most people like rye and feel it ferments more quickly than other flours. BUT you can use whatever flour you want or have; rye, whole wheat, white ...
I use rye to start my starter. Then for subsequent feedings I may switch over to white.
How to make it
A bit about hydration.
This is for a 100% hydration starter. That means it has 1 part flour to 1 part water. Different hydrations of starter and breads create different results. A lower hydration (more flour than water) will give you a more sour taste and needs to be fed less often. A higher hydration (more water than flour) will be milder tasting and need feeding more often.
There's a LOT more to it than that, but if you're a beginner I think this 1:1 starter is a good place to start for you.
- Mix ¼ cup clean room temperature (filtered or bottled) water with ¼ flour.
Stir everything together until all the flour and water have mixed well.
2. Cover it with a cloth and let it sit for a couple of days in a room that's approximately 23C (75F).
I'm using a bowl but you can also use a glass or mason jar.
After just 8 hours you can see tiny bubbles starting to form.
3. Once you notice bubbles and a yeasty smell (after 2 or 3 days) you can get rid of half of your mixture. Just scoop it out and throw it down the drain. It may have dried out a bit. That's O.K. Add ¼ cup of water and ¼ cup of flour to the remaining starter, mix and cover up again. This is called feeding the starter.
Continue feeding the starter in this exact way every 8-12 hours for the next 2 weeks or so.
Remove half the starter, then add ¼ cup water and ¼ cup of flour. Wait 8 - 12 hours and do it again.
After several days of doing this you'll notice the bubbles are starting to get bigger.
Starter not rising?
If you don't think your starter is doing much you can:
- Put the starter close to an open window so it has more access to wild yeast. (no idea if this is a fable or not, but I did it and it worked)
- Put the starter in a warmer part of the room, or warmer room in general.
- Increase the amount of flour and water you add from ¼ cup of each to ½ cup of each.
By day 12-15 you'll notice your starter will start to double in size after you feed it. It won't just get a bit bubbly, it will literally double in size!
Once your starter reliably doubles in size for several days, you can break out the cigars because you are the proud parent of glop. Some people suggest you keep feeding it on the counter like this for up to a month to really get the sour taste.
Those people must not have a life. Because just feeding this starter twice a day for two weeks is enough to make a person crazy. Trust me. By the end of two weeks you'll be as sick of feeding this starter as you are of feeding your family every night.
Once you have a successful starter you can stick it in the refrigerator until the day before you're going to make bread.
Reviving it
The day before you make bread the starter should be removed from the refrigerator and brought up to room temperature. Once it's warm, add ¼ cup of bottled water and a ¼ cup of flour. This will help activate the starter and get it bubbly again. 8-12 hours later, do it again. Your starter should now be ready to use.
Ingredients
- Bag of flour
- Filtered tap water or bottled water
Instructions
- Day 1 - Mix together ¼ cup flour and ¼ cup lukewarm water. Let sit for 2-3 days until bubbles form and it smells of yeast. During this time, stir the mixture whenever you think of it.
- Day 4 - Remove half the starter mixture and dump it down the drain. Feed the remaining mixture with ¼ cup flour and ¼ cup water. Mix.
- Continue to dump and feed exactly the same way every 8-12 hours for 2 weeks or until the mixture reliably doubles in size after feeding.
- Store the sourdough starter in the refrigerator until the day before you're ready to make bread. The day before, remove the starter, let it get to room temperature and then feed it. (add ¼ cup flour and ¼ cup water) 8-12 hours later, feed it again. It is now ready to use in the sourdough bread recipe of your choice.
So there you have it. Sourdough starter glop. Pass it on.
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Thank you for the inspiration to do something I've been thinking about for a while - your method worked beautifully!
Excellent! I'm so glad it worked! ~ karen
Hi, it's been 15 days now and I am doing what you said, but my starter is not doubling in size. It's not growing at all. It smells great and it looks good, but how long should I keep doing this before giving up?
Hi Jana - Try putting it in a warmer spot. For instance, when I had trouble getting one restarted I put it on my heated kitchen floor. Doubled in no time. You can try anywhere that's warm (near a heat register, fireplace etc.) Keep trying! ~ karen
As someone else mentioned- in the oven with the light on. Worked great for me in cold MInneapolis.
Ok - no way I am making this. But I do love sourdough bread and I now appreciate it much more. More importantly-- the Little House references were hilarious!!!! I love your writing. Well done.
Thanks Beth! Sigh. I love The Little House books. ~ karen!
Actually I've been wanting to try this. Thanks! Now I feel like Mary Ingalls (minus the blind part)!
I don't remember us worrying about contamination as 'glop' was passed from neighbor to neighbor. That never crossed our minds. No flu vaccines. No Purell. No worries about germ-ridden shopping cart handles. The good ol' days before we knew that bugs live on our eyelashes.
Hi, Karen! I'm so excited for you with the sourdough, and I'm looking forward to reading about what you end up baking with it. I don't know if this will be valid for you, but I've found that my sourdough starter is the most useful for me when I can use it for the things that I already bake normally. So, if I'm going to make pizza, I make sourdough crust pizza. And if I'm going to make pita bread, I make sourdough pita bread. I've also made sourdough bagels, dinner rolls, French bread, pancakes, waffles...etc. I use a Herman sourdough starter, but because I've converted it to 100% whole wheat, it tastes more like regular sourdough than something sweet. As always, thanks for the inspiration, Karen. And congrats on the magazine articles. That's really cool! :-)
Yay! Thank you, Karen!
Great post Karen. It really works too. I have done this with breads and loaves for many years and usually with great success. Have had a few failures too but we don't talk about them...hehe
This was definiantly a good article Karen, almost makes me want to start some starter again ! Well fooled ya maybe another lifetime ! Good luck to Sour Sue...
So fun! I recently read a cowboy cookbook. He talked about how baking skills would determine if a chuckwagon cook was hired or fired. While on the trail, the cook would sleep with his jar of sourdough starter to keep it warm enough on cool nights. Great read! Thanks for sharing this recipe.
Oh! The chuckwagon cooks would name their starters too and some restaurants in West Texas still bake bread based on starters that began over a hundred years ago. So...what are you going to name your starter? :)
Sue. I will name her Sue. Sue the Sourdough starter. Sour Sue. - karen!
Funny you should mention the sour dough starter, Karen. I read very recently (like 2 wks ago) that making bread at home has become the latest obsession in Prague and just like you go to bloggers' meet up, home bread makers go to sour dough starter swap events. So there you go, or rather, I think you should go, too (to Prague, I mean). You would not mind extending your popularity to Europe, would ya? :-)
But God bless you for posting the recipe for sour dough starter. Although I love sour dough bread, for me, there aren't enough hours in a day to try this at home. And why should I, when each week I go to the local farmers' market where I buy the absolutely best sour dough rye bread with caraway seeds (as you can see, a low-carb diet is a real struggle for me).
So now I am adding to the list of things I admire you for another item: "Makes sour dough bread at home".
I used to have sourdough starter that I kept going like a million bazillion years ago and made some incredible sourdough bread! Don't know why I quite! I think I just got breaded out....probably because I made so much bread that I could have started a bakery...either that or I had to go get a real job or something....yeah probably it was that!
Now then, how do I actually make the bread with this starter? Any old bread recipe?
No ma'am. It has to be a sourdough recipe that uses sourdough starter. I've tried a few. And tomorrow I'm trying another, LOL. My goal is a nice crisp crust with sort of medium sized holes. I'll let you know how it goes. ~ karen!
Around these parts it's Amish Friendship Bread which is a sweet bread..but sort of the same because you make the starter and let it ferment and keep adding things until it is declared ready..while sharing baggies of it with all of your friends..or those people you no longer wish to have as friends..Anyhow when the pain in the ass part is done it is a very yummy bread..I haven't done it in quite a while but I have figured out that people really like it but they would prefer that you go through the misery of growing it and just share a nice baked loaf with them..We used to give loafs out every year for Christmas..
ok, I just started one. I bake my own bread most of the time, and I used to go mooch off my mom's starter but then she quit doing it.
however, I am fairly certain that you should not be dumping it down the drain, especially if you have old plumbing.
We used to put it in the compost bucket, but now I wonder if you can feed it to the chickens. My relatives on a cattle ranch feed their cows a bit of fermented corn.
I made sourdough starter 20 years ago, and went through an active bread making phase for about 2 years. Then I moved, and for some reason stopped baking bread, but now I want to start again. By the way, Karen, you say that making the starter is easy, but that making the bread is tricky. I have only ever made bread in a bread machine, and it was no trouble at all, and the sourdough loaves were very tasty. And that was using one of the very basic machines of over 20 years ago, when the machines first came out. These days, the machines are much better, and I plan to buy a newer, updated one, even though I'm sure my old one would still work just fine. Another interesting point of note relates to what you said about wild yeasts wafting through the air outdoors. That is absolutely true, and different strains of yeast live in different geographical areas. The reason that San Francisco sourdough is so famous is because the particular yeasts that waft about there are particularly tasty. Go figure. Lastly, since different yeasts have different tastes, would anyone who has a particularly sour, mature starter care to share? I like mine as sour as I can get it, and since starters get half dumped at every feeding anyway, maybe I can adopt someone's monster reject. Maybe I have something to exchange for it. Perhaps Karen could connect us? I'm in the Toronto area.
I had sourdough starter years ago. Got the recipe out of my bread maker cookbook and used it to make bread in the maker. Made a lot of it. Was no where near as complicated as this method - but probably didn't taste quite as good either. Still, for us lazy ones, it is another approach. Or are bread makers too passe (my accents don't seem to work!) now?
This is great! I love sourdough & hubby has mentioned recently that I should make our bread. I had a friendship bread starter for ages that I finally let go. Gave away most of it so I wouldn't get fatter than I was.
If I want to give the glop away, how much should I give? And at what stage?
Now I'll have to wait two weeks to make some, guess I could make some regular bread in the meantime. Super cool, thanks Karen
Hi Laura - Wait to give the glop away until it has finished it's regular feedings. (so at the end of the 2 week period, once it's able to double in size after a feeding) I have about half a mason jar to give to my sister which is tons. At one point when I was dumping it down the drain, instead of dumping it, I put it in a mason jar and started one for her. So I was feeding 2 mason jars of starter. Conversely, you could just take about 1/4 of a cup and give it to your friend. Even a tablespoon would be enough! ~ karen!
Again with the '70s. It was a very good time for those of us who like doing everything Karen likes to do, so it's a delight to see a whole generation who missed out on that bringing it around again.
Back in those "glory days" I was working 40 hours a week (and commuting about 6 more) and still decided I should be Wonder Woman and bake all my own bread and grow all my own vegetables (organically, of course) and canned and froze nature's bounty for weeks on end so that MY kids would never have all those dreaded preservatives and pesticides pass their lips. Imagine my delight when I found out they sneaked out with their friends and ate at McDonalds because that's what you do when your mom is crazeeeeeee.
But sourdough starter is the one thing I resisted. I read books about it. I knew people who had starters. I was offered several little baggies of glop. But somehow I knew that it would take over what was left of my life if I let it in. This is one of the decisions of my life that I have never regretted. I still garden and bake bread, but it's less of a "mission" now, at a more enjoyable pace, and I can get the best sourdough bread from a local bakery.
Still, I look forward to seeing Karen's post on making sourdough goodies. I might feel a little wistful about passing up my chance to start some glop back in the day that I could pass on to my grandchildren, but not for long.
I understand now why everyone was passing around baggies of glop in the 70's. That seems much easier than the 10-cups-of-flour-over-20-days method of getting the starter. While I TOTALLY understand the whole romantic appeal of the Little House on the Prairie feeling from making the starter from scratch, I think I'll make a gelli plate, instead, and try some mono-printing on fabric for the quilting I'm about to do. And I'm very glad to know how to make the starter, just in case the quilting doesn't go very well.