Sourdough Starter
the quality and vitality of your culture determines the texture and tang of your sourdough. It’s important to become familiar and comfortable with your starter before making bread as it is very discouraging to have a bread failure due to poor starter.
If you mix flour and water and leave it to sit for several days it will grow a community of micro-organisms and become sour from the lactobacillus present in the air, water and flour multiplying. If you take a spoonful of the fermented dough and feed it some more water and flour (¼ cup of each) it will ferment again. This is called propagation, or “feeding” the culture.
Your wild yeast populations need to be very strong and healthy as the bacteria won’t levain your bread well and you need plenty of active yeasts to create enough gas for your bread to rise sufficiently. A sourdough culture will perform best when it is fed at least once a day, but sometimes cold storage is necessary when you are not baking for more than a few days at a time. It keeps fairly well in the fridge, but will need 2-3 days of feeding before it will make high quality bread again. If you are only going to bake with it every other week or once a month you will want to store it in the fridge and then take it out several day before baking to feed it back to health: 1 teaspoon of active levain can be fed ¼ water and ¼ cup flour each day.
Ingredients
- 1/4 cup whole wheat flour
- 1/4 cup water (70 degrees)
Instructions
Getting Started
When starting a sourdough culture (levain) from scratch it will take about 2 weeks to build up enough healthy yeasts, provided it is warm enough and fed daily (with the exception of the first 2 days). Once it is active enough (it will be frothing with bubbles and smell yeasty) you can use it every day if you want.
Example Feeding Schedule
- Day 1: Mix whole wheat flour and water in a clear jar or other container.
- Day 2: nothing
- Day 3: Take 1 tsp from the first mix and refeed with 1/4 Cup flour and 1/4 Cup flour
- Day 4: Repeat step 3 daily until mixture maintains a frothing, bubbly, consistency for 12-24 hours after refeeding. Those bubbles are proof of the gas it will generate to raise your bread. It should smell yeasty with a touch of alcohol and acidity.
If you’re not sure if your starter is ready feed it another day or two. Somewhere between 10 and 24 hours, the microbes will have consumed most of the available nutrients and the starter will begin to pass its peak ripeness.
Once your culture is looking lively…it’s time to make sourdough!
This is a 2-3 day process but only requires about 20-25 minutes of work. The first day, you’ll build your culture so that you have enough to levain (rise) your bread. Feed the culture once in the morning and once in the evening. The following morning it will be ready for bread making!
Tips:
- It’s best to keep your starter culture about 68-70 degrees. If it is colder than that the yeast will be very sluggish and as it gets over 80 degrees it will begin to favor the lactic acid bacteria too much. The warmer it gets the faster it will multiply (and run out of food). A seedling heat mat with a thermostatic probe is a nice way to maintain proper temperature during the coldest months when you house is likely to be under 65 degrees.
- The most important factor in maintaining a healthy levain culture is your ability to determine how “ripe” it is at any given time. Each time you feed the starter culture it will begin its process of feeding and multiplying. When it has consumed most of the available food from a feeding it will be “ripe” and ready to either make bread or be fed again(or put into storage). If you keep feeding your culture at it’s peak ripeness it will reward you with a frothing, lively culture that will make very good bread.
- how do you tell when it is at peak ripeness? When you are first building a starter culture it will be hard to tell since the microbe communities will be small so be patient at first. As you feed your culture each day smell it, taste and notice it’s texture. Eventually you will know from a quick whiff and a look but at first pay very close attention.
