Sourdough starter

Posted on January 02, 2022

The sourdough starter is just a (wild) yeast culture that you keep alive by feeding it flour at a regular basis. There are quite some sourdough starter recipe's out there. Most of them use a lot of flour, here is a less waste-full version.

Creating a starter

Creating a new starter takes a few days, but after that, it's quite hard to kill.

Day one

In an clean air-tight container (a jar for jams is good, or a weck-jar):

1. Add 25g of white flour and 25g of whole grain flour
2. add 20g of grated apple (clean apple and greate including the skin)
3. add 35g room-temperature water
4. mix (I use a chopping stick)
5. use a spoon to clean the sides of the jar (push it back down)
6. mark (using a pen or a piece of tape) the level that you started with
7. give it a name
8. close lit and put it away at warm spot (20-23c is best, avoid going over 30c)

Day three (and the coming 5/6 days)

Take a new air-tight container:

1. Stir the previous starter
2. Transfer 10g to new container (throwout the rest)
3. Add 25g of white flour and 25g of whole grain flour
4. Add 50g of water
5. mix and clean sides
6. mark the level you started with
7. put it away at warm spot

Done

The starer is ready if you see it at least double in size between two days. Then you can switch to keeping it alive, which is a lot simpler.

Maintaining a starter

If you forget to feed the starter, it will die, so we don't want that. There are all kinds of approaches to keep your starter happy. An important thing to understand is that all you are balancing is the ratio of old starter and it's food (The hydration ratio has an influence on both taste and growing speed).

I tend to use a 1:5:5 ratio. For every gram of old starter, I add 5 gram of flour and 5 gram of water. And to reduce flour consumption, I actually use 1g:5g:5g for feeding my starter in a small herb-jar.

The maintenance schedule differs a bit if you are a regular baker or a weekend baker

Weekend baker

The trick is to store the starter in the fridge when not needed, this slows down the yeast, but doesn't kill it.

2 days before starting with levain

The starter has to be "refreshed".

1. take it out of the fridge
2. transfer 1g to a new small jar
3. add 5g flour and 5g water
4. mix and clean the sides
5. cover and let it rise

day before starting with levain

Repeat the process (it should have doubled in size already, but no worries if it was a bit slow).

Regular baker

Repeat every day (I do it every evening, if possible at the same time as making an levain)

1. transfer 1g to a new small jar
2. add 5g flour and 5g water
3. mix and clean the sides
4. cover and let it rise

If you want, you can reuse the same jar, just empty out most of the contents and add new flour. Also, if you can find it, switching to 100% whole grain rye flour makes the starter a lot harder to kill.