Spencer Berkebile

Feb 10, 2022

Sourdough Starter Beginners Guide

"What is a sourdough starter? And why do I have to feed it daily?"

Those two are probably the questions I get asked the most when I'm asked about bread, or my family is pestering me to make something for them. What is a sourdough starter? Well, it's a fantastic playground of yeast and lactic acid that you can make out of two simple ingredients: flour and water. Why do you feed it daily? The more often you feed it, the better it becomes! You need to catch the starter at it's peak activity and when you are feeding it daily, monitoring it's rise and fall, you can more accurately plan your bakes to take advantage of the starter when it is at it's peak.

As stated before, there are two crucial components to the starter (and one that is just very helpful): flour and water! One thing that makes baking in general easier is a digital scale, and this is what we will use for our starter as well! My starter, aptly named "Fro-dough", gets taken care of on a daily basis, it's part of my morning routine while I make myself some coffee as it doesn't take long once you get a flow going.

So let's set ourselves up for success by grabbing three things: some sort of strong flour (I'll try to cover strong flours later in a post, but long story short it's high in gluten) like whole wheat, some room temp water and your digital scale. Now that we've got our main components next to us let's talk about combining these two things. To get the starter going you'll need to combine equal parts flour and water, stirring to combine completely, and then letting it rest - easy, right? Well, yes, and also no. So while we've combined these two things you'll need to now do this for the rest of your life (unless you want to give up baking, you monster).

Jokes aside, let's talk actual values here - so your first time combining these two things will not yield much, so let's start with about 100g of flour and 100g of water. Once these are thoroughly mixed you'll want to wait about 12 hours and next we will do something that will feel wrong at first - we are taking our starter, portioning out about half and throwing it into the trash can. Now that you've thrown out your newly found passion and maybe had a good cry about it, we start over! 100g of flour and 100g of water, mixed thoroughly into the remainder of the starter we began this morning. Now what comes next is repetition and a test of patience.

Waking up the next day we will repeat the exact same steps as before, throw out half and mix in a new mix of 100g flour and 100g water. 12 hours later, repeat! At this point now though you should begin noticing that when you've come back to the starter it will have grown and shown some bubbling! Exciting! Now that we've begun seeing progress, it's continuing until the starter is beginning to double in size which should be happening somewhere around the 7-10 day mark (or longer if you are unlucky). Just keep at it, and eventually you'll get a strong starter that is frequently doubling in size in hours.

Once you've gotten your starter comfortably to a point where it can double in size and it's been around a week since you've begun this journey, you can ratchet back on size of the starter you are building and frequency. My routine is around 50g flour and 50g water, normally taken care of once a day at the very beginning. If I am baking more often I'll increase my amount a day or two before! So if you know you've got a big baking day coming up just increase volume of starter a day or two before so you can be prepared. Thankfully baking is flexible in some of the more "fair" areas, but it can be brutally punishing on your first few loaves.