I went to the grocery store on the 10th of March, intending to stock up. People were already panic buying, so when I got to the store, I headed for the baking aisle. “Ha, ha, ha”, I thought. “I won’t be trying to buy bread, I can bake, I’ll buy yeast.” Aaand, the yeast was gone. Oops.

So, I decided to make a sourdough starter. A sourdough starter is simple to make. Take about ¾ cup flour and ½ cup water and mix. Okay, you say, I’ve made paste. Now what? Cover it lightly with plastic wrap or a towel and wait. How long? About 24 hours. It should look like this

Starter Day 1

Then add another ¾ cup flour and ½ cup water and wait again[1].

When I started writing this, I googled sourdough starter. I was hoping to find something on the science behind it. I found this. They use nearly the same recipe I do, but stress the importance of weighing your ingredients. Sigh. Look, I get weighing ingredients in baking. It leads to a superior product. I will weigh ingredients when I make the bread. But this is sourdough starter. Let’s think about who originally used sourdough – pioneers and miners. Do you think they weighed out their ingredients, making sure that the flour and water weighed the same? No. They estimated. Maybe weighing the ingredients at this stage gets you a slightly better product, but it seems like pretentious claptrap to me. I don’t think it really matters if you weigh it or not. They also emphasize making sure the temperature is right around 70. Again, fluctuating temperature isn’t that important. Pioneers and miners couldn’t really control the temperature and it still worked.

What you’re doing when making sourdough is capturing wild yeast and lactobacilli and giving it a medium to grow in. The yeast and bacteria will vary by where you live. So, a San Francisco starter will be different from a New York starter. In addition, some areas (like my kitchen) have more yeast available than others. I’ve lived here for years and I bake pretty regularly with yeast. So, my starter took off.

Okay, so you’ve got bubbles. Now what? Now, you discard about half and feed it again[2](don’t actually throw away the discard). By feed it, I mean add ¾ cup flour and ½ c water. It should start to look stretchy like this.

Starter Starting to Thicken

That’s good. It means the gluten is developing. At this point, you may see a liquid on top of the sourdough in the morning. That’s the hooch. It means your sourdough is hungry.

Hooch

Skim it off and feed the sourdough. When your sourdough starts getting stretchy, the gluten is developing. If you stir in the hooch, you may destroy the gluten (it’ll recover with time). That can be okay if you want your sourdough to be really tangy. But, mostly, you want to skim off the hooch and then feed the starter.

How do you know if the starter is ready for baking? Do the float test. Take a glass of water and lower a teaspoon or so (again, no need to be precise) into the glass. If it floats, the starter is ready to bake bread.

When I was growing up, my mother always made sure to have Bisquick on hand. Bisquick is a general purpose baking mix that can be used to make biscuits, muffins, pancakes, dumplings; what have you. You should think of sourdough starter the same way. Even before it passes the float test, you can use the starter[3] or discard for things like crackers, pancakes or waffles,

Nephilium’s Waffles

dumplings, pretzels, or muffins.  The float test really only applies to making bread. It is the original baking mix.

Sourdough bread (like Nephilium’s lovely boule

Nephilium’s Boule

or my baguettes)

Baguettes

is one of those things that invites experimentation. I have made a plain sourdough (from an online recipe – can’t remember which) that I turned into baguettes and a whole wheat version of my own device that I made into a boule.

Sourdough bread recipes seem to be all over the place. I have found recipes that called for ½ cup starter and 4 cups of flour and some that called for 1 cup starter and 3 cups flour and some that called for 2 cups flour (still making 1 boule) and some that call for a cup of starter and a packet of yeast. So I just decided to wing it.

For my whole wheat boule, I used 1 cup starter, 1 cup water, 1 cup whole wheat flour, 2 cups bread flour and 1 tsp salt. I’ve made a lot of bread and typical two loaf recipes call for 3-4 cups of flour. Most of the sourdough recipes I found also called for 3-4 cups flour. So, I went with three cups of flour total. I know that you can usually substitute 1/3 of the flour with whole wheat flour so that’s why I did 1 cup whole wheat and 2 cups bread flour.

I used my mixer and blended it all until a ball formed and it cleaned the bowl. Then I put plastic wrap over the top and stuck it in the fridge for 24 hours. I punched the dough down, formed it into a ball and let it rise on the counter until it doubled in size. Then I slashed the top and stuck it into a 450 degree preheated oven to bake for 45-50 minutes.

Here is the result.

Whole Wheat Boule

That is my winging it recipe, and sourdough purists are clutching their pearls. Purists will say you should follow the hydration method and autolyze the flour. If you want to know how to do that, this is a good primer. Roughly you weigh your flour, water, starter and salt and use a ratio for the recipe. It will yield a very light, fluffy loaf,

[4]but does require you to spend more time fiddling with the dough.

You can also use sourdough starter to replace yeast in your regular bread recipes. This gets a little complicated. It depends on how hydrated your sourdough starter is. However, if you are following the instructions I gave (1/2 c starter, ½ c water and ¾ flour) you can guesstimate that your starter is 1:1 hydrated. That means you can use 1 cup of starter to replace a packet of yeast.

You do need to adjust the water and flour, but that will depend on your baking knowledge. Start with a little less water and flour than the recipe calls for, then adjust. There are formulas, but my eyes started to glaze over. Does the dough seem dry? Add a little water. Too wet, add a little flour. Note that I say a little. Add too much flour and the bread will be tough. I tried to find a good article about substituting starter for yeast, but they were all vague.

My two favorite bread recipes (both from Sundays at Moosewood by the Moosewood Collective, couldn’t find links) call for ingredients that do not have gluten. One uses oatmeal and the other uses corn meal. They require a sponge plus two rises before shaping the loaves.

So, here’s what I did. I substituted 2 cups starter for the yeast, reduced the flour by 1 cup, then followed the recipe otherwise. I let the dough rise first overnight in the fridge, then let it rise again on the counter before finally shaping it into loaves and letting it rise on the counter until doubled. These are the results.

Oatmeal Bread

Cornmeal Bread

Overall, sourdough is the original baking mix. Don’t be afraid to experiment. Even if you don’t follow all the rules in the video I linked, you’ll still have something you enjoy eating. That’s what really matters after all. Have fun with your sourdough.

 

[1] If it doesn’t look like the picture, there are ways to kickstart sourdough. You can add dried fruit or mashed up grapes – both of which have naturally occurring yeast on the skins.

[2] Actually, if you need your starter to grow (for a specific recipe, perhaps) you don’t have to discard half. It’ll be fine. It may produce more hooch, but just skim that off.

[3] If you don’t want to discard the starter, see here.

[4] I don’t use a dutch oven for baking sourdough. I like a crispy crust, but like hops, there can be too much of a good thing. I like the crust I get from putting a pan of water in the oven with the loaf.