Starting Your Sourdough Starter

First thing's first, what is sourdough bread?

Sourdough bread, often just shortened to 'sourdough', is a bread made by the fermentation of dough using wild lactobacillaceae (a family of bacteria) and yeast. Lactic acid that is created from the fermentation gives the bread a sour taste and allows it to be preserved for longer than most bread. 

Sourdough consists of natural dough fermentation, without the use of any commercial baker’s yeast or other chemical leaveners. Instead, it relies upon the use of sourdough starter, a mixture of flour and water, which is also a continuously fed culture of wild yeast and lactic acid bacteria.

As a means of making bread, sourdough is thousands of years old, and was the primary means of leavening dough up through the middle ages, before eventually being replaced by barm from ale fermentation, and most recently by commercial yeast about 150 years ago.

So what exactly is sourdough today?

We are currently in a modern day renaissance of sourdough, where bakers are combining the current understanding of fermentation science with methods rooted in the origins of civilization as we know it. Much more than a type of bread, it is a means and method that can be used to make any bread imaginable.

Simply put, sourdough is a process that honors the history of bread as 'the staff of life’. It is a throwback to the tradition of bread being made by artisan hands, and bakeries being the heart and soul of the communities they serve. With much longer fermentation times than commercial bread today, it is the original slow food. There is intentionality to it which reminds us of simpler times and better, healthier food.

Okay, then what is a sourdough starter?

In simplest terms, it is a symbiotic culture of wild yeast and lactic acid bacteria that spontaneously ferments from mixing flour and water, and is continuously maintained via a method called back-slopping, where a small amount of previously fermented flour is used to propagate each subsequent fermentation.

Sourdough starter comes in many forms, but they are both literal and metaphorical examples of the nature of bread, and the cycles of life which sustain us all. We romanticize it because it is romantic in nature itself, but we also have a much greater understanding of the underlying science of it all as well.

Through this understanding, we are able to utilize it to create a broad spectrum of breads with a wide variety of flavor profiles. From puckeringly sour to tantalizingly sweet, and from crusty and caramelized to impossibly soft and fluffy, the humble sourdough starter is at the heart of it all.

When you start your starter, you'll maintain your culture indefinitely by "feeding" it fresh flour and water (sometimes referred to as refreshing) consistently. A sourdough starter is used to seed fermentation in new dough when baking bread and is responsible for leavening and flavoring your loaf of sourdough bread.

Ready to get started?

If you are ready to jump in, you can make your own sourdough starter by following the directions below. This will take about 2-3 weeks. Or, you can purchase our dehydrated starter and reactivate it yourself by just adding water. Once reactivated and after a few refreshes, you'll be ready to bake in 4-5 days. 

You will see lots of claims online about starters that are hundreds of years old, or have some sort of special pedigree, but most of these claims are unverifiable, and there is no intrinsic benefit to an old starter. Our starter is the same one used in a busy bakery each and every day, and it has created over 30,000 loaves of bread in the last 4 years.

How to Make Brand-New Sourdough Starter

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A Few Notes before You Start

Flour

• Use unbleached flour at a minimum, preferably with 50% All Purpose or Bread Flour and 50% freshly milled whole grain to begin with. The whole grain can be wheat or rye, but I prefer rye for creating a starter.
• If you don’t have access to freshly milled then try a good quality flour like Bob’s Red Mill. We use the whole grain from Janie's Mill, and they ship across the US.

Water

• Most tap water is great for creating a starter, but you want to make sure it’s not heavily chlorinated and doesn’t contain chloramine. Hard water is better than soft water, because yeast and bacteria love minerals like calcium and magnesium.
• If you aren’t going to use tap water, filtered or spring water is good, but don’t use distilled or purified water. The minerals have been stripped out and they aid fermentation.

Tools

• You don't need anything fancy to get started, but if you're looking for guidance on the basics, here's what I recommend:
  
  • Glass Jar or Food-Safe Plastic Container
  • Food Scale
  • Spatula
  • All Purpose Flour
  • Bread Flour
  • Whole Rye Flour
  • Whole Wheat Flour
  • Thermometer
• Tip: Weigh the container you'll be keeping your starter in by itself to get its empty weight. Write that down somewhere (or, directly on the jar). Then, you'll know the weight of the jar so you can figure out how much starter to keep, and discard, each feed. 

Step One

1. Make a 50/50 blend of 150g All Purpose or Bread Flour and 150g Whole Rye or Whole Wheat Flour.
2. Place in a sealable container for future feeding. 

Step Two

1. Remove 30g of your flour blend and put it in the glass jar where your starter will live. This should be a container that can be covered, but not airtight. If you're using Weck Jars, don't use the rubber seal it comes with.
2. Add 30g of water to your flour blend and stir well to fully hydrate the flour. Make sure there are no dry flour clumps remaining. 

Step Three

1. Cover the container and place somewhere that is well ventilated (to reduce the risk of mold developing) at warm room temperature (about 72-73°F).
2. Leave untouched until you see bubbles forming to indicate fermentation is taking place, usually 24-72 hours (1-3 days).

Step Four
Once you see fermentation bubbles, you can start feeding.

1. Sit a clean jar on your measuring scale, and tare to 0. 
2. Add 30g of your starter, 30g of your flour blend and 30g of water. You now have approximately 90g of starter. This is a 1:1:1 feed ratio because you added all equal portions.
3. Discard (throw away) the leftover starter, or read more about how to save discard for other recipes.
4. Repeat the 1:1:1 feeding once every 24 hours until you see the starter begin to rise and fall. This may happen within a day or two, or could take a week or so. You may also get an initial flurry of activity, only to see it completely die back down again. This is normal, so just continue feeding once per day until it starts rising agin.

A Note from James

Each time you feed your starter at this stage you want to start with 30g of existing starter, and feed the same 1:1:1 ratio. I find it helpful to have a second container to weigh into, then scrape the remaining starter (discard) into the trash as you don’t want to use discard until you have a healthy and active starter.

Wipe out the container first with a paper towel so you aren’t putting starter down your sink, then rinse out with hot water. You can use mild detergent, but don’t use anything that’s antibacterial on it. If you use detergent make sure you rinse very well, as residue can kill a developing starter.

Step Four

Once the starter begins to rise and fall, increase the feeding frequency to twice daily, ideally every 12 hours. Keep to the same 1:1:1 ratio (30g starter, 30g flour mixture, 30g water) and continue to discard the extra. 

Try to keep the time of day that you feed it consistent each day, as much as possible. Keep feeding twice daily until the starter doubles reliably within 4-6 hours at 72°F. I’ve seen this happen as quickly as a week, but also seen it take 2-4 weeks as well.

Note: Be patient and keep to the schedule. If at any point you feel like the starter is failing you, just go back a step and be patient with it. Also make sure you are vigorously stirring the starter. By stirring vigorously, you are introducing oxygen into the culture. When yeast is in an aerobic environment (in the presence of oxygen) it can produce more energy from respiration than it can during anaerobic fermentation. During respiration, the yeast multiply exponentially since it has excess energy. Then once the oxygen is depleted, it flips back into anaerobic fermentation.

Step Five

Once you have a starter that will reliably double in 4-6 hours, it’s strong enough to begin leavening bread and the pH will have dropped to 4.1 or below, meaning bacterial pathogens can’t survive.

1. A this stage, you will either reduce the flour mixture to 75% All Purpose, or move to 100% All Purpose. 
2. Continue feeding once per day with your new mixture.

Whole grain (especially rye) is higher in an enzyme called alpha amylase, which means it ferments faster. Alpha amylase breaks down complex carbohydrates (polysaccharides) into simple, fermentable sugars. In other words, it releases more fuel for the yeast from the flour. This is good for promoting enzymatic activity in a developing starter, but it also means the starter will be at peak activity for a shorter time than with refined flour, and it tends to develop acid load more quickly.

Congrats, you have a Sourdough Starter!

At this point you’ll have an established starter, but it may take a few more weeks for it to begin to mature. You can feed it once per day now, but if keeping at room temperature then you may want to increase the feed ratio so that it doesn’t go hungry.

Hungry starter develops acidity and affects the balance between the yeasts and lactic acid bacteria, which will weaken it over time.

Feeding / Maintaining Your Starter

Watch your starters rhythm, so that you can begin to judge how long it can go with various feed ratios. Try feeding it 1:2:2 (eg 30g starter, 60g flour, 60g water), then watch it rise and fall, seeing how long until it falls to its original level again. Then try 1:3:3 or 1:5:5.

You can also store it in the fridge, in which case we recommend feeding once per week. For this method I do recommend taking it out and giving it 2 feedings to knock back acidity and wake it from dormancy before asking it to leaven bread.

Common Sourdough Starter Problems

Read more about the most common starter problems and how to solve them.