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I love baking bread, but I avoided keeping a starter for years because it seemed like too much commitment. The recipes in my bread books looked long and daunting: There was a lot of talk about things like temperature and hydration and ash content, and I imagined a strict feeding schedule that would require me to get up at a reasonable hour on the weekends. I was certain that even if I could keep a fledgling starter alive for longer than a week, I wouldn’t be able to make good bread with it because I could never be devoted enough.
The truth is, while you certainly can dive very deep into the world of sourdough if you want to, you can also put in minimal effort and still reap the rewards: a tasty, made-with-your-own-two-hands loaf of crusty bread. It doesn’t need to have a perfect crumb or the exact right balance of lactic to acetic acid to be better—and cheaper, and fresher, and more satisfying—than anything you can buy in a store.
And, as I’ve discovered, keeping a starter alive is much less burdensome than many people would have you believe. Take five minutes to feed it once a day and you’ll have a little pet that you can use to make bread whenever you want (mine’s named Sir Mixalot). But you can also stick it in the fridge and feed it only once a week (or even less—I’ve forgotten about mine for weeks at a time) and it will be fine.
To get yours going:
- Start with 1 cup whole wheat or whole rye flour, which have more microorganisms and nutrients to contribute than the all-purpose stuff.
- Mix with ½ cup non-chlorinated water (filtered or bottled is ideal—chlorine kills things, and we don’t want that) in a food-safe container (bigger is better, so it has room to expand).
- Loosely cover it, and set it in a warmish spot (if your home is on the cool side, try the top of the fridge).
- Roughly 24 hours later, it’s time for the first feeding: Discard about half your starter and add 1 cup unbleached all-purpose flour and ½ cup water, then mix.
Discarding half the starter might seem wasteful, but it’ll help keep the mix healthy and provide fresh food for all those little yeasties—and keep the thing from taking over your whole kitchen. (What to do with the discard? Compost it, or use it in pancakes, waffles, or pizza dough—try searching for recipes that use leftover starter.)
Continue this five-minute ritual of discarding and feeding every morning (or every evening, if you prefer), and by the third or fourth day, you’ll probably see some bubbles and growth. If nothing is happening, try a warmer spot for a day or two. If it’s still not showing any activity after five days, try starting over with different flour. Think of it as a plant—you may need to experiment a bit to find the environment it’s happiest in.
Once your starter is bubbling and rising after feedings, if you’re ready to bake some bread with it, up your feedings to twice a day for a couple days. Or, if you want to store it for future usage, transfer it to the fridge and drop the feedings to once a week. A couple days before you want to use it for baking, take it out and go back to daily or twice-daily feedings.
With a healthy starter going, the world is your bread basket. Use it to make dinner rolls, cherry hazelnut bread, cardamom buns, and even croissants. Or just stick with a simple loaf of bread—it’s up to you.
| 1 | cup fed starter |
| 1 1/2 | cups lukewarm water |
| 5 | cups all-purpose flour, divided |
| 2 1/2 | teaspoons salt |
| 1 | cup fed starter |
| 1 1/2 | cups lukewarm water |
| 5 | cups all-purpose flour, divided |
| 2 1/2 | teaspoons salt |
Have you tried making a sourdough starter from scratch? Share your experience—and maybe some of your favorite starter recipes!—in the comments.
Written by: Laura Sant
Popular on Food52
16 Comments
Heard a fascinating episode of GastroPod where they discussed starters and found there was great variety in people's starters. The difference depended on the bacteria living on the baker's (freshly scrubbed) hands.
No two starters are alike, so you may notice that your starter likes the benefits of milk, whereas mine gets plenty of lactobacillus and yeast from my 100-year old house!
Because yeast is a fungus, once it's established in a starter, it's pretty hard to kill (ask anyone who's had athlete's foot!). There's a symbiotic relationship between the yeast species and the lactobacillus species in a sourdough and depending on the feeding schedule (and the species, I would imagine) one gets varying levels of sour. And since they play nicely together, I imagine it's pretty hard to kill the established lactobacillus population in a starter as well. Magnus Nilsson of Faviken writes about a wooden kneading bowl belonging to his grandmother which was never cleaned; before baking he fills it with warm water and in a day the starter imbedded in the wood comes to life.
There are benefits to using a poolish apart from hoping for sourness; prefermenting part of the dough does add to the flavor and starts 'processing' the wheat (the understanding of which is beyond my college chem level comprehension!) making the dough easier to work with and improving its keeping qualities.
Being someone who is thrift-oriented, I would probably do the same if I had poolish waiting for me. Mangia bene!
Related note: my 5 minute task is doing the mise en place for my sourdough: measuring out the flours, water, and other ingredients, as well as refreshing the needed amount of starter. Next morning, it’s a quick process to put everything in the Ankarsrum and make bread!
That 5-minute process was just doubled, at least, by the use of volume rather than mass measures. (When I first saw the heading of the article, I asked myself, how on earth can feeding a starter take 5 minutes? It's not a high level skill nor does it require any practice. When weighing, you can do this in under a minute, and the only thing that must be washed is the spoon you used for stirring.)
For the benefit of readers looking to do this most efficiently, may I respectfully suggest the following metric measures (convert to ounces if you must):
230 grams of starter (NB: A cup may weigh more of less, + or - 10 grams, or so, than this depending on how active the yeast in it has been during the day or so before measuring)
354 grams filtered water
600 grams flour
Salt - the recipe doesn't specify whether to use regular or kosher. For the quantities of other ingredients in this recipe, I recommend 12 grams. Of course, it doesn't matter whether you use table or kosher when weighing.
I hope you find this helpful. I offer it in the spirit of making a positive contribution. ;o)
P.S. Yes, I know that some of the bread recipes I posted on this site 7 or more years ago provide volume measures (none of those use a starter). I'm working on re-testing to update all of them. The bread recipes that were tested and photographed by the Food52 test kitchen are locked, so I'm putting links in the comments to the revised versions of those.
The rest of the starter sits out overnight after getting fed about 1 cup flour, 1/2 c water. In the morning, it goes back in to the refrigerator. The rising times are unpredictable compared to using commercial yeast, so I make bread this way when I am not on a tight schedule.
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