An instant-read thermometer optional, but very helpful. I will earn a commission if you purchase the tools I recommend via the links above, at no extra cost to you. This helps me run the blog and keep delivering high-quality recipes and guides to you. Place a clean container on your scale and make a note of how much your container weighs. Add grams g whole wheat or rye flour or all purpose if that is all you have and g water. Stir thoroughly until no dry spots remain.
Read more about creating a warm place in a cold house here. You may see some bubbles and activity in your starter, or you may not see anything happening yet. Add g water and stir to break up the starter. Cover the container loosely again and set in your warm place for 24 hours. Read more about the discard process here. Today you will start feeding your starter twice a day. If you saw an initial surge of activity in the first couple of days, this may die down, or may continue to ramp up slowly.
Cover the container loosely again and set in your warm place for 12 hours. This is why having multiple containers is helpful. Repeat the Day 3 feeding process every 12 hours. You may see no activity for a few days, and then be surprised to find your starter showing lots of activity, or it may slowly ramp up day-to-day.
If you are only using all purpose, keep doing what you are already doing. Read troubleshooting tips here. By this point, you should hopefully see some reliable activity in your starter. If your starter consistently rises to double or triple its height within hours of feeding it , it is ready to bake with.
If not, continue to feed on the hour schedule until it does. This could take up to 14 days in some cases, especially if you are using only all-purpose flour or your starter is in a colder environment.
Over the next hours, check in periodically to monitor the growth. After the starter reaches its peak, it will fall back down, leaving streaks on the side of the container. Once your starter behaves as described above, you can successfully bake with it! For simple maintenance instructions including how to store your starter in the fridge and dry your starter, read more here. Below are four stages of sourdough starter, from just being fed to being ripe and ready to bake.
This starter is fed with whole wheat flour. Showing visible rise, with bubbles appearing on the bottom and slight doming. Approaching double the starting size, with bubbles beginning to appear throughout the container and on the surface. Starter is ready to use or be fed again. Use this chart to convert ingredient weights into approximate volume measurements if you do not have a scale. To measure, I spoon sifted flour into a cup.
If you use different flour or use the dip-and-sweep method, the measurements may be slightly different, which is why I encourage you to purchase a scale— grams will always be grams.
A little extra flour or water here or there is okay, but try to be as close as you can be. When it comes to baking loaves, while you can measure by volume, you will achieve the best results measuring by weight. The good news is that the older your starter gets, the stronger it gets. Below are options for maintaining your starter between bakes.
Over time, this will be closer to every hours, though a mature starter could wait to be fed every 8 hours or so without much detrimental effect. Still, this means two or more feedings a day. Even though discard is very useable stuff, this may feel excessive and involved to a home baker. Below are two ways to preserve your starter for short-term storage and long-term storage. Once your starter is established it becomes more resilient.
This means that you can store it for longer periods without feeding, but in order to do so, you have to slow down fermentation activity or else all your natural yeast will die off. Luckily, we can do this in the fridge. You can dry starter if you want to take a break from actively feeding it, or if you want to mail some to a friend. This is the way that starter will come if you purchase it rather than starting your own.
To dry starter, take starter at its peak, but instead of discarding a portion, spread it in a thin, even layer over a sheet of parchment paper. To rehydrate it, weigh out an amount of starter and crush it into small bits. Rehydrate it with the same weight of water, and then feed it with the same weight of flour.
Allow it to rise and fall, and proceed to feed as normal. Depending on the strength of the dried culture, this can take 3 or more feedings, or may be pretty quick to show activity again.
No need to continually feed your starter nearly a cup of flour every time you feed it. Once your starter is active and well-established you can feel free to reduce the quantity that you keep between bakes. You will need to increase the amount of starter you have by feeding without discarding a few times before baking, but after you bake, you can keep that same small quantity in the fridge.
Here are some frequently asked questions that you may have while creating and maintaining your starter. Why do I feed sourdough starter? What do I feed sourdough starter? All about flour and water. How do I keep a smaller amount of starter? What is levain? All about preferments. What is discard? Why we do it, and how we can use it. What can I bake with sourdough starter?
How do I make my breads more sour? I received starter from someone else. How do I make a warm place in a cold house? My starter was active but now it looks dead, what's wrong? Do I have to throw my starter away and start over? My starter is overflowing out of the jar!
The quick version : a sourdough starter is an active colony of wild yeast and good bacteria cultivated by combining flour and water and allowing it to ferment.
The science : a sourdough starter is a symbiotic community of lactic acid bacteria and wild yeast. Both yeast and bacteria feed on the carbohydrates present in flour when hydrated with water and allowed to ferment.
These two live microorganisms exist in harmony within your starter, creating an environment rich with lactic and acetic acid. These acids provide both flavor and nutritional benefit. Breads that are made exclusively with sourdough are referred to as naturally leavened.
This creates a more flavorful, digestible bread with more readily available nutrients. The yeast and healthy bacteria within the starter snack on carbohydrates present in the flour you feed it, creating gases, alcohol, and an acidic environment. In order to keep the starter healthy, you have to maintain a regular feeding schedule. When you first make your starter, you will stir together some type of flour with water, and let it sit.
Then you will feed it every day, twice a day, for about two weeks. This takes no more than 3 minutes and a few simple ingredients. Starter made and maintained with just flour and water. Flour : Different guides will give you different instructions in terms of what kind and quantity of flour to use.
In general, it is good to know that whole wheat flour or rye flour contain more natural enzymes to feed the bacteria and yeast in your starter than all purpose flour. This helps kickstart activity, especially in a new starter. You are most likely to see results sooner if you can use one of these flours.
I choose to continue to feed my starter with either whole wheat flour or a combination of all purpose and whole wheat or rye because it behaves the most predictably when I do. King Arthur Flour is high quality, affordable, and readily available across the US. In other countries, try to find high quality, unbleached flour that suits your price point.
I started my starter with whole wheat flour and it is my preferred flour to use for starter today. Keep in mind: whatever flour you feed your starter with is the flour that will end up in your final bread. So, for example, if you want an all-white sandwich bread but your starter is fed with whole wheat, some whole wheat will end up in your final bread. If you have the means and desire, you may have great results with organic flour, but I have always used conventional, unbleached flour with success.
King Arthur Flour is readily available in the U. I live in New York City, where we happen to have excellent tap water! When your starter is reliably rising to double or triple its size and falling in the jar anywhere between hours after you feed it dependent on your ambient conditions and the flour you feed with it is ready to bake with. When the starter is at the peak of its rise, it is called ripe , fed , or mature.
You may have heard of the float test, which involves dropping a spoonful of ripe starter into a glass of water. If it floats, the test says that the starter is ripe and ready to use. It may be that the rye flour sample had just as much, if not more of a robust population of yeast and bacteria, but it was hard to say without baking. Overall, I was able to grow stable cultures in all five cases. Here were some general trends:.
The same concept applies to varieties of rye flour. In my tests, my brand of rye flour Arrowhead Mills produced the stiffest starter over time. So far, I'd succeeded in growing five distinct, mature starters from different flours or flour blends.
But beyond visual cues and smells, I had no way of determining whether one starter performed better than the other when it came to baking a real loaf. So I put all my new starters to the true test of quality.
I evaluated exterior crust, interior crumb structure, flavor, and texture. Crust: Blistered, tall, and round. Dark caramel color. Crumb Structure: Even and open bubbles, not too much irregularity. Flavor and Texture: Mild, balanced sour, slightly earthy, more substantial texture; denser than a plain white loaf.
This loaf proofed and baked beautifully. The fermentation was quite active, and the finished proofed dough was light and bubbly. The crumb was relatively even, with large and small bubbles distributed across the entire surface of the loaf. While breads with rye flour are typically gummier and dense, the texture here was sturdy and substantial—but still pleasant.
This bread was slightly darker in appearance—both inside and out—than the other samples. The flavor was a rounder, more dairy-forward sour that played nicely with the earthiness of the rye flour. Crust: Mildly blistered, less tall loaf. Light caramel color. Crumb Structure: Wild, molten, and slightly uneven. Flavor and Texture: Sharper sour, soy, malt, umami; gummy texture. This loaf was harder to handle and bake.
I suspect that the inclusion of bran from whole grains inhibited gluten development somewhat, making the dough harder to handle. The overall fermentation was not quite as active as the other loaves, resulting in a slightly shorter loaf.
Still, it was a good loaf despite these minor imperfections. The crumb was wild and molten like lava, with massive bubbles in some areas and smaller but open bubbles concentrated in the middle.
The flavors were delicious: a sharp tang reminiscent of pecorino cheese, hints of soy, malt, and roasted umami. The texture was slightly gummy in comparison to the other loaves, and could have benefited from additional time resting before cutting. Extended resting is a common technique for loaves higher in whole-grain content: It allows cooked starches to retrograde and set, giving a firmer, less gummy texture. Crust: Very blistered, tall, round loaf; tan exterior. Crumb Structure: Wild, molten, and uneven.
Flavor and Texture: Balanced sour, light tasting, airy. This loaf was slightly over-proofed, indicating a vigorous and more active starter than the other samples. Remember: I kept fermentation time and temperature constant for all tests. This dough rose faster and higher in the designated time frame than all the others—a little too fast, in fact. Despite that minor error, the bread still baked nicely.
The dough behaved most closely to doughs I've made using my old starter, Ryan, showing strong fermentation as it rose prior to shaping. The crumb was massively open and molten through 60 percent of the loaf, with smaller but still open bubbles concentrated on the right side—maybe an indicator of slight over-proofing, or a shaping error.
The flavor was balanced and mildly sour, the texture light and fluffy. Crust: Moderate oval, moderately blistered, mahogany exterior. Crumb Structure: Slight molten and mostly even, slight tan interior. Flavor and Texture: Toasted soy, malt, nutty, tangy; moderately soft. This loaf proofed and baked reasonably well. The dough wasn't over-proofed by the time of shaping, resulting in a consistent and round shape. The dough was extensible but strong throughout its fermentation.
The crumb was slightly molten and generally even, with a darker tan interior. The texture was soft but substantial enough for a sandwich. The flavor was outstanding: sour, full of toasted malt flavors, and reminiscent of soy sauce—my favorite of the bunch. Crust: Light tan, moderately blistered, thin crackling crust. Crumb Structure: Textbook open web, molten, uniform; creamy, pale white.
Flavor and Texture: Mild, faintly sour, very clean flavor; fluffy. This loaf baked nearly perfectly; it was tall and round, sporting a pronounced raised point of crust or ear. The fermentation was steady, and the finished dough easy to handle with minimal sticking. The crumb was pale white, featuring wild and molten bubbles that were evenly distributed throughout. No matter what flour you choose, over time you will produce a culture that is sour, bubbly, and—most importantly—one that can raise bread.
Depending on what flour you use in your starter, there appear to be differences in time to maturity, flavor, activity, and performance in baking. In light of these differences in starters, Kristen recommends adjusting dough formulas to account for the flours in your starter.
Since starters can contribute a significant portion of a bread's final flour content, it helps to think about ways to compensate for that flour in a complete bread recipe. Doing so takes experience and some math. Additional higher-protein flour will provide the necessary gluten structure that the whole wheat flour tends to inhibit.
Bread made with nothing but flour, water and salt — and time , the most important of all ingredients. Before you get to work on making your first loaf of sourdough bread, you probably want your starter to be active and full of rising power. My first advice is to not stress about this too much. Think of each of those mishaps are opportunities for learning. Once you have baked your bread, you will know if your starter was ready or not. That said, there are a few signs and tools that can help you in assessing the readiness of your sourdough starter:.
Once you practice making bread, you will learn to judge the starter by its look, smell — and taste, and the float test becomes something you rarely do. The process of making a sourdough bread begins on the night before you want to make your bread or more precisely, hours before you start mixing the dough. Which is why when we start making the bread, we bread out of our normal 24 hour cycle a bit, and add one more refreshment right when the starter is at its peak.
In the morning, you will have a total of roughly grams of young but ripe sourdough starter waiting for you to bake bread with it. Now, as we are making sourdough bread, we will replace the yeast with the sourdough starter. In this article, we are going for a basic, pleasantly sour sourdough bread. Using this element, you can scale the recipe and see how the changes in the total flour or weight affect the other ingredients:.
Mix all ingredients except salt in a bowl until no dry lumps of flour remain. I like to mix the dough using a plastic scraper: hold the scraper in your right hand or left if you are left-handed and then use your other hand to rotate the bowl while you scoop the dough with the scraper.
This is advanced stuff, which you can skip if you are just baking your first sourdough bread. In the recipe however, to make the recipe easier to follow, I decided to mark the starter as another ingredient rather than including it in the flour and water. A small, but sometimes meaningful difference.
Everything just happens slower, making the process more enjoyable and peaceful if also harder for the impatient among us — myself included. As we saw in our kneading technique roundup , there are many ways to do this: with or without kneading the dough. If you cannot devote the next few hours to closely following the dough and working on it every half an hour, you can knead the dough for about 10 minutes and then let the dough rise until roughly doubled in size.
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