The Ultimate Guide To Understanding Your Sourdough Starter
Once you have your sourdough starter, what’s next? This is your guide to understanding your sourdough starter, covering everything from maintenance and feeding to recognizing when it’s ready for baking. With proper care and attention, your starter will flourish, providing you with the tangy flavour and airy texture that define great sourdough bread. Let’s dive into the essentials to ensure your starter becomes a reliable companion in your baking journey!
Understanding your sourdough starter is a continuous journey. It evolves with the changing seasons, different types of flour, and varying hydration levels. Your starter is always communicating with you; you just need to learn how to listen. By tuning into its signals, you can cultivate a thriving starter that makes delicious bread every time.
1. What Is A Sourdough Starter?
A sourdough starter is a mixture of flour and water that has captured wild yeast and bacteria.
2. How Does A Sourdough Starter Work?
When a sourdough starter is fed flour and water, it ferments and creates energy. That energy, combined with more flour and water in bread dough, produces enough energy to produce gas that naturally leavens bread!
3. How Do I Make A Sourdough Starter From Scratch?
If you haven’t created a sourdough starter yet and you want a fool-proof way to get one in less than a week, you can get a free guide down below to get started!
4. What Is The Best Flour To Feed My Sourdough Starter?
For getting started, whole-wheat or rye flour is the best flour to feed your developing sourdough starter. Once it is established, you can feed it with whatever flour you like, I use all-purpose because it’s most reliable and convenient.
5. How Often Should I Feed My Sourdough Starter?
When you’re just starting out, feed your sourdough starter everyday, for about 1-2 weeks. Once it becomes healthy and consistent, you can feed it less.
Always save a small portion of sourdough starter after you use it to mix bread dough. This is what gets stored in the fridge and fed again next time you want to make bread. Without this small piece, there would be no wild yeast or bacteria in your mixture of flour and water to ferment and produce the energy to leaven the bread.
If you make bread at least once a week, you can feed it around 12 hours before you’re wanting to mix bread dough, otherwise, it can be stored in the fridge.
6. Why Is My Sourdough Starter Not Rising?
- Your house is too cold.
- Your water is too cold.
- Your culture of bacteria and yeast has over-fermented and died.
- Your starter is cold from the fridge and you fed with cold water.
- Your starter has been fed too much flour.
- Your starter has been fed too much water.
7. How Do I Know When My Sourdough Starter Is Ready To Use?
- Your starter is ready to use when it has grown at least double to triple in size since feeding.
- It has large and small bubbles and is doming at the top.
- It smells sweet and tangy. It shouldn’t smell aggressively sour, this could be a sign of over-fermentation.
- It floats when you put a blob of it in water.
8. Can I Use All-Purpose Flour For Sourdough Starter?
Yes! I use all-purpose flour. It’s consistent, readily available, and sweet.
9. What Is Sourdough Discard?
Sourdough discard is what doesn’t get used to make bread.
When you feed your starter, you don’t want to feed a large amount of old sourdough starter or it will be overly sour and weak. This is why you remove or “discard” some old starter so you feed only a small amount of old sourdough starter. This produces a healthy and sweet smelling starter.
10. What Can I Do With Sourdough Discard?
You can make all kinds of recipes with sourdough discard. Things like muffins, loaves, cinnamon buns, cookies, etc.
It’s made of only flour and water so you can correct any recipe by reducing the amount of each when you add sourdough discard. Or don’t correct at all, just add and see what happens!
Adding sourdough discard won’t make much of a difference to most things except for cookies. With cookies, you’ll want to brown the butter and use only egg yolks to reduce the water content as you’ll be adding water that’s in the starter.
I like to ferment baked goods with sourdough discard but you can just add and bake as usual. I ferment by mixing the dough or batter and placing it in the fridge for 12+ hours.
You can use sourdough discard to make sourdough rhubarb walnut muffins, sourdough einkorn chocolate chip cookies, sourdough honey sweetened banana bread, sourdough rye brownies, rye discard crackers, sourdough Saskatoon berry cake, and even sourdough tortilla shells! The possibilities are literally endless.
11. When Do I Feed My Sourdough Starter?
Once your sourdough starter is established, feed your starter at least once a week or 12 hours before you want to mix bread dough.
12. Do I Have To Feed My Starter Everyday?
No, once your sourdough starter is established, you don’t have to feed it everyday. However, when it is developing, you have to feed it everyday. I would recommend feeding everyday for the first two weeks.
13. What Do I Do With My Starter When I Want To Take A Break From Baking?
When I want to take a break from baking, I feed my starter a lot more flour than water, until it forms a dough ball. I let it ferment at room temperature until double in size and then I place in the fridge. It will stay alive in the fridge for months this way as there is lots of flour food for the starter to feed on slowly in the cold fridge.
The ratio of starter:water:flour for this stiff sourdough starter is roughly 1:2:3, though it doesn’t have to be exact.
14. Do I Have To Feed My Remaining Starter Right Away After Using It?
If you’re not mixing another batch of dough 12 hour after you’ve just used your sourdough starter then you can just put the small amount remaining in the fridge until you want to mix dough again.
If you’re doing it this way, make sure you don’t leave that small portion of starter in the fridge for longer than a week or it won’t be
15. How Much Leftover Starter Do I Need To Save For The Next Feeding?
Save around 10% of the amount that you’ve made. For me, making two loaves at a time, I save about 1-2 tablespoons.
I’ve saved as little as a teaspoon of starter for the next feeding and while I wouldn’t recommend it, it does work in a pinch.
16. How Long Can My Starter Stay In The Fridge Without Feeding?
Sourdough starter is quite resilient. If you put your leftover starter in the fridge, it will keep alive for weeks. A stiffer starter could last for months in the fridge.
However, note that you may need to feed a starter that’s been stored in the fridge for 1+ weeks before it’s back to it’s normal heathy self and ready to make bread with.
17. Once I Want To Make Bread, How Do I Reactivate My Starter?
- Grab small portion of sourdough starter saved in the fridge.
- Feed it flour and water.
- Let it ferment for around 8-12 hours or overnight until bubbly.
- Use for what you need for bread-making and save a small portion (around 1-2 Tbsp).
- Place that small portion back into the fridge until the next time you want to feed before mixing bread dough.
Conclusion
Your starter is unique to you, your environment, and your climate. Ultimately, its up to you to understand, pay attention and listen to your sourdough starter.
If you have any remaining questions, please feel free to leave a comment down below and I’ll try to help as best I can!
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Wow, this is super helpful, answered all the questions I have as a beginner. Great reference, thanks
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