A Simple Sourdough Starter Recipe Recipe on Food52 (2024)

Yes, mix the starter with other flour to make the sourdough bread. No matter the type of flour you use.
Put the remaining starter in the fridge for further use. You can pick a portion of the fridge starter for one recipe. I feed first 20g of fridge starter with 20g/20g of water/flour until double volume. Then second feed the refreshed 60g starter with 60g/60g water/flour. Final weight of starter is 180g. I use whatever required for the recipe is required and return the remaining starter, if any, to the original starter in the fridge. This works fine and starter is always alive in the fridge. This feeding process takes 24h approx.

Thank you, but how does one avoid a boatload of starter in the refrigerator if one bakes infrequently?

I heard her mention that she used her rice starter for gluten free bread.

Love your sour dough recipe. Saw it on 52foods and make it a lot. Every batch comes out different even though I am dead on with the weight of the flour, water, starter and salt. But it still tastes excellent. I use red fife flour and unbleached flour. Love working with red fife flour.

Not a big deal at all, this is by no means a precision process. You might want to discard 60g. of your starter once it is nicely fermented, to keep your quantities the same as the recipe, but you could go ahead with more starter too. By the way, for anyone starting this, it's a good idea to get a tare weight for the container you're using before you start- makes it easier to figure what you have later.

For the scaleless, here's another simple recipe (from Nik Sharma, published in the SF Chronicle)- 1/3c. flour +1/4c. filtered water to start, add the same amount every day for 3 more days (no discards); should be ready by 5th day (assuming a reasonably high room temp.).

Nan May 6, 2020

Have you tried this? I've never seen a recipe with no discards.

I made the recipe in this article without the first discard; saw no reason on earth to throw away 1/2 of what I'd made instead of making half as much to begin with. The purpose of discards is simply to keep the amount of starter steady if you're not using it. Sharma's recipe is designed to build to a desired amount of starter; you would need to do discards (or uses) to keep it going unless you wanted to end up with a bathtub full.

pinky October 7, 2020

Can it be made with wheat flour

pinky October 7, 2020

Also can you start Nik Sharma’s starter with just 50 g of flour and then keep adding to it

Smaug October 7, 2020

I assume you mean whole what- works fine.

May it helps you to say I keep my starter in the fridge all the time. I don’t use it very often such some water develops on top of it after couple weeks of inactivity. When I need starter, I just pick it from the fridge, stir it with a spoon, then extract a part of it, then return the starter to fridge. Usually, I remove 20g of starter, put it in a other jar, thoroughly mix 20g of water until completely dissolve then thoroughly mix 20g of flour. Then I leave it on top of the counter until it doubles volume or more. At this time, this may take at least 12 hours, maybe more than that. Then I redo the process one more time but with 60g water, 60g flour. In total I will get 120g of starter. Sometime, a third rise may be needed to get more starter or to provide leftover starter to return to fridge, with the main starter.
Please note that I live over the 49th parallel, I mean in a very cold place and my kitchen is about 21-22C. This procedure is working very well for me. It should also work for you either.
I would say, be patient and let the starter do it’s job before to feed again. Your main starter may missed some strength before you stored it.

Thank you. A lot of sights say to feed it once a week but i can't seem to find specifics. Have you tried drying your starter? I've seen that several times on sights.

So baked my 1st bread and it was great.
used the throw away for starting a starter with gluten free flour. Mainly rice flour.
taste ok but still too flat.
do you do the drop in water test for gluten free as well?
can I use a variety of gluten free flours? Want to use up all my little bits until I find the one I want to use consistently.
does that make sense?
and where do I follow your answers?

I have always started all of my sourdough with organic non-gmo rye flower. I add the same water & flour from then on but use white hard red wheat flour.

no such rule. lots of folks like the hocus pocus of the 'mystery of sour dough and make 'rules' SS Is fine

thanks

Starter is acidic, so you wouldn't want it to spend much time in contact with reactive metals.

May it helps you to say I keep my starter in the fridge all the time. I don’t use it very often such some water develops on top of it after couple weeks of inactivity. When I need starter, I just pick it from the fridge, mix it with a spoon, then extract a part of it, the return the starter to fridge. Usually, I remove 20g of starter, put it in a other jar, thoroughly mix 20g of water until completely dissolve then thoroughly mix 20g of flour. Then I leave it on top of the counter until it doubles volume or more. At this time, this may take at least 12 hours, maybe more than that. Then I redo the process one more time but with 60g water, 60g flour. In total I will get 120g of starter. Sometime, a third rise may be needed to get more starter or to provide leftover starter to return to fridge, with the main starter.
Please note that I live over the 49th parallel, I mean in a very cold place and my kitchen is about 21-22C. This procedure is working very well for me. It should also work for you either.
I would say, be patient and let the starter do it’s job before to feed again. Your main starter may missed some strength before you stored it.

you barf bourbon? ;-) yeast of any kind is the result of an alcohol reaction between grain and sugar(s). Fresh yeast comes from the settling of yeasty boys to the bottom of the tank. Your sourdough should never stink but will smell of alcohol

Did you use bleached AP flour?

Yes. I am in Mexico and I can’t get unbleached or bread flour. Any tips for a starter w basic AP? Thank you!

That’ll happen with bleached, try whole wheat or rye flour.

That is so helpful, thank you! And then do I continue to feed it with the rye or ww? Much appreciated.

Yes!

If it's alive, you didn't mess up. The basic idea with feeding the starter is to remove what you need to bake with and replace it so you end up with the same amount, but home bakers may not be baking frequently enough to keep the starter refreshed; thus the whole deal with discarding part of it. Your proportions sound on the dry side, I would go with the proportions in this recipe. Most modern kitchen scales have a feature where you can put any container on the platform and zero out it's weight, so you're just weighing the contents. If you lack this, you could weigh your container empty (this weight is called the "tare"), then weigh it with the starter and subtract. Arithmetic is good for you.

Oh thank you for your help, I was so worried I’d already ruined the starter! I did add 1/2c water to it so it’s less dry. I will attempt weighing it and go from there—wish me luck as my scale is old and I’m terrible at maths.😃 At this point, should I just discard a pretty big part of it At the next feeding to decrease the size or should I leave it be and refrigerate it until I’m ready to bake?

Wella wella wella- the amount of starter you keep should ideally be such that you use about half of it when you bake, so it's up to you and whatever recipes you're working from. No big deal about having extra, but if you're doing discards rather than using it, having excess becomes a bit wasteful. If you can track down an article on this site called "why is all the yeast sold out right now" there are a lot of suggestions for using discard among the million or so comments. If you plan on baking to any extent in the future, a new scale would be a great investment- I have a balance and a kind of nifty old spring scale, but the modern digital scales have them way beat for convenience and versatility. A lot of baking recipes now give only weights, with metric preferred because it makes calculations easier; also the scale makers generally give metric weights finer definition than ounce/pound weights. Weight measurements are often more convenient, particularly with the zeroing function (you can add ingredients directly and skip things like trying to scrape honey out of a measuring cup) and for some things- particularly fluffy ingredients such as flour or cocoa, are much easier to make reliably. My scale is an Oxo, a very popular line- I believe you can get a very nice one for $20-$30. Bon apetit.

Thank you so ich for your reassuring replies to my questions, Smaug!💐

Question about weighing ingredients. When using the scaling adding ingredients in succession what if you add too much of one. Like salt or baking powder you can't remove what you've added since it's in the flour.
I'm always amazed watching cooks measure all the ingredients

You do want to be careful about that- work up to your weight, and give the scale a second to register before you add more. But things like salt and baking powder are really better measured with spoons; rounding off to the nearest gram isn't so great when your total weight is only a few grams. Some things, like flour, you can probably scoop a bit off the top if you overshoot, but caution is necessary.

The recipe gives volume measurements (eg 90g/3/4c. flour). If you keep it up for a while you'll get a feel for it. All purpose flours vary quite a bit; for bread making, a high protein (gluten) content is usually preferred. Bleached flours are as a rule lower in protein than unbleached, and different brands can vary quite a bit. If you use a soft (low gluten) flour your bread is probably not going to rise as high, but that's not necessarily a deal breaker; you can still make pretty good bread.

mainegrains.om

I am in a no way an expert, but cake flour has cornstarch in it. I would think that would alter the environment for the yeast to develop in this starter.

Yeast is only slightly more picky than co*ckroaches; it will consume pretty much any kind of carbohydrate, including starches and sugars, with no trouble. Wild yeasts are present in the air, but I believe lesser processed flours will bring yeasts (and maybe lactobacilli) with them and may be faster- rye flour is said to be particularly good for starters, and in my own limited experience it does seem helpful. You can probably get a starter going with cake flour, but it is a poor choice for bread making as it hasn't the strength to support a strong rise..

LOL, You didn't notice above where it states she wrote an entire book on sourdough bread? If her publisher and a website featuring good food seem to think she knows what she is talking about I think I'll take her word. Also, there is rarely ONLY one way to do things in life.

Sourdough starter is how we cultivate the wild yeast in a form that we can use for baking. Since wild yeast are present in all flour, the easiest way to make a starter is simply by combining flour and water and letting it sit for several days. You don’t need any fancy ingredients to “capture” the wild yeast or get it going — it’s already there in the flour.

However, using milk may help to capture or increase the presence of the lactobacilli that create for sourness. Or possibly sourity or sourination or something- not a word that comes up a lot.