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Sourdough Starters

What are they? How do they work? How to make one.

By Faith StrattonPublished 6 years ago 3 min read
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Sourdough – this word used to both interest me and terrify me when I was in cookery school. There is something totally magical about the premise of a sourdough. You’re telling me that you can make a whole loaf (a totally delicious loaf) using only flour and water? That sounds equally brilliant and insane. So, what is a sourdough, how does it work, why is every shop in Shoreditch advertising them?

Let’s start with the what, the bare bones. Before we figured out how to make commercial yeast and package it and sell it, bakers had to get hold of their yeast using a different method. How did they do this? They attracted wild yeast to something called a starter. You may have heard this term knocking around a lot and wondered what the hell it is. A starter is a mixture of water and organic plain flour (I’ll get to that in a bit) that is left out to be inoculated with wild yeast. Where does wild yeast come from? I hear you ask. Well, it’s everywhere, it’s on your hands, it’s in the air, it's in your plain flour. Why use organic plain flour? Because it isn’t as processed as normal plain flour which makes it a comfy environment for your wild yeast. Once you have cultured your wild yeast you can mix this with your bread dough and you have a sourdough! Okay, it’s slightly more complicated than that but we will get there, first let’s talk about how to make a starter.

The Starter

For this, you will need a 2 litre Kilner jar with the orange rubber seal removed

700g organic plain flour

700ml water

Mix 100g flour and 100ml of water together in a small bowl until completely combined with no flour lumps. Pour this mixture into your Kilner jar. Keep the jar in a cupboard at around 22°C and leave it overnight.

The next day, mix 100g organic plain flour and 100ml water in a small bowl. Take your starter out of the cupboard (don’t worry if nothing appears to have happened yet) discard half of the starter and pour the rest of it into the bowl with your flour and water and stir to incorporate. Wash your Kilner jar before pouring your new starter mixture into it and placing it back in the cupboard to rest overnight again.

Repeat the step above every day for 7 days. For the first 4 days, you probably won’t see much activity, this is because the bacteria will be dying off – giving the yeast room to breathe. Around day 6 or 7 you should see a lot of bubble activity.

Now you will only ever need around a couple of tablespoons of starter at a time. I suggest having around 100g of starter available. You can reduce this by throwing away any excess, which I suggest at the end of the first week as this won’t be a very strong starter. Another way of reducing this is using it for a sourdough

You will need to ‘feed’ your starter as you did in the second step using 100g of organic plain flour and 100ml of water once every week and keep the starter in the fridge.

As you can probably tell, this whole sourdough thing is quite a commitment. If you don’t have the desire to spend a week culturing a starter (I don’t blame you) you can always go to an artisan bakery and ask them if you could have a bit of their starter.

Once you have your starter it does become like a pet. A pet you feed once a week and keep in the fridge... However, they do make for a great loaf of bread, make sure to keep an eye out for my next blog which will take you through the process of making your first sourdough loaf.

Thanks for reading!

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