Starting Your Starter

You are about to create a living organism that requires love and care. In return you Starter will provide you with the magic required to turn flour, water, and salt into sustenance.

Flour and water is all you need to build the magic that makes sourdough bread possible. You are going to start with flour and water, but over the course of 7 days, it is going to develop into something very different. On day 8 you will be making your first two loaves of bread.

It is day 2! Today you will give your Starter its first feeding of flour and water.

It’s day 3. You should have seen some activity over the last 24 hours. Today we will do our first discard and feed the Starter.

It’s Day 4 and it is an easy day. You will do a discard and a feeding.

It is Day 5 and it is just another day of a feeding and a discard. Your Starter should be showing some real signs of activity since the last feeding.

You have been going through the motions of discarding and feeding your Starter. Today is more of the same, but tomorrow things will get interesting. You are almost there.

Today is different. We are changing our feeding ratio to set ourselves up to make dough in the morning.

Your Starter should have doubled or tripled overnight. It is ready to go! Today you are going to make two loaves of Sourdough Batard/Oval. They are a great jumping off point into sourdough bread making.

What do you do with the leftover bit of Starter after you have mixed your dough? That question is answered in this section. You have a couple of options.

Stretching/Folding the dough is a quick and simple process that is super important to developing the gluten proteins in the dough. Stretching/folding the dough is an acquired skill. You might feel a bit clumsy at first, but it will become more natural over time.

The dough should feel full of air and pillowy. Although we do want to preserve the gasses inside the dough, we are going to lose some of this volume. But, don’t worry, we will still produce a light fluffy crumb with nice air pockets. Be gentle with your dough, but don’t be afraid to handle it.

Scoring is a fun part of bread baking. No matter how consistent you are with your scoring, there will be variation. Making two loaves gives you double the practice and it allows you to make an adjustment on the second loaf if the first one doesn’t come out to your liking. Or, if you do produce the outcome you wanted; can you repeat it on the second loaf?

Baking…it's the easy part.

Cooling is the hard part.

There is just no way around this. THE BREAD MUST COOL FOR AT LEAST 1 HOUR prior to cutting into it. 2 HOURS would BE BETTER.

You have spent the last week building up a robust Starter. But, now what? How do you keep it alive? How do you take a break from baking without killing it? This Chapters will give you three reliable options to manage your Starter that will help to minimize or eliminate discard. They can be used interchangeably. Managing your Starter is a skill. This information is invaluable.

I know that throwing away 150g of Starter discard wouldn’t be the end of the world. It is literally $.02 worth of flour, and that is a generous estimate. Throwing away 150g of Starter feels elitist and wasteful. Putting the Starter in the fridge for two days is an option, but we are going to take a different approach that streamlines the process of getting back to baking. We are going to go Micro.

Bread baking can go on and on ad nauseam. It is this daily baking process that can absolutely eliminate discard. Discard just WILL NOT exist. But, how does that work?

The refrigerator is your friend. The cooler environment of the fridge will slow down the metabolism of the Starter. So, instead of leaving it out on the counter and feeding it daily, you can put it in the fridge and feed it once every 7-10 days.