How To Achieve Sourdough Starter Mastery

sourdough mastery can be achieved by anyone yes you today is your day I hope you're doing well I'm doing great now before we get started wait a minute nope please come back I need your subscription if you don't already have an active sourdough starter or you haven't seen my ultimate sourdough starter guide then please go check that video out I'll leave a link in the description which by the way thank you guys so so much for all the great support on my ultimate sourdough starter guide I just want to cover that really quickly it got a lot of great responses it's one of my most viewed videos now and I just wanna say thank you and also thank you for deeming me on Instagram with all your photos of your beautiful sourdough starters they look wonderful which by the way if you don't already follow me on instagram click the link below thank you sourdough isn't hard there's just a lot of variables but it's relatively easy to keep them up so long as you're armed with knowledge let's do this shall we now to kick this off we're gonna talk about cleaning your jar after it starts to get some build-up people always ask me if I do this I do it maybe once every three months when buildup is annoyingly bad and I'd recommend you do the same but it's not detrimental now while you're cleaning your starter container out please don't forget to place your starter in a glass bowl cover with plastic wrap just so that you don't accidentally you know wash it down the drain cuz man that would be depressing then just simply wash it out until it's nice and shiny clean really simple but again not detrimental now for one of the most important ones of them all how to feed your starter intuitively how to know when to feed your starter and what signs to look for there are a lot of factors that influence your sourdough starter how it ferments out performs etc when it comes to the rate of fermentation aka when you need to feed it there are really two major components here those two components are temperature and inoculation percentage temperature is pretty simple it has to do with ambient temperature as well as water temperature obviously the colder the ferment the slower its gonna go the warmer the ferment the faster it's going to from it now inoculation percentage is the percentage of mature starter you leave behind when you add the fresh flour and water for a feeding now obviously the more mature starter you leave behind the faster it will ferment and the less you leave behind the slower it will ferment now a good average for those numbers would be a 25% inoculation and around 70 to 73 degrees Fahrenheit which is basically room temperature now when I say 25% I actually mean 25% of the total weight and flour in grams so if you have a hundred grams of flour 25% of that would be 25 grams these percentages are called Baker's percentages and all of them work off of the total weight in flour now these are the factors that are going to affect the rate of fermentation okay now that you know that the best way to maintain a starter is to be super duper observant of what's going on what is it smell like and what does it look like at various stages of fermentation at the beginning right after a feeding it starts to rise as normal but it reaches a point where it begins to stop rising it begins to flatten out at the top and eventually starts to fall back down that is the most optimal moment to feed it the reason why is because all the little naturally occurring yeasts have fully metabolized all of what they can from your previous feeding so basically they just need more food aka fresh flour and water that's the whole point of feeding it if you wait a few hours after it begins to fall that's totally fine they won't ruin your Fuhrman alright now that we got past that long-winded part let's go over some questions that I've been getting so the first one is how do I know when my starter is active the best way to tell is really if it's rising and falling predictably that's usually a pretty darn good indicator the next question is why do we throw away starter and what can I do with that it seems kind of like a waste well my answer to that is it is imperative that you remove starter when feeding it this keeps your firmance consistent so you can have a schedule to work with it's also necessary for all sourdough starters otherwise they'll just over ferment and eventually overflow out of a container with all that said I do have a video for what you can do with the discard if you don't want to throw it away and I'll have a link in the description for that can I use other flours why rye so I like to use rye because it tends to be the most microbially active of all the flour choices but you can replace it with any whole-grain flour that you want to such as a regular whole-wheat now here is the final and biggest question of them all which is what can I do if I don't want to feed it every day and really don't bake that often I understand why people don't want to feed their starter every single day it seems like a chore and you do use a lot of flour so if you're not gonna be baking more than once a week then my best suggestion to you would be to put it in the refrigerator and then all you have to do is feed it once a week now to feed it from the refrigerator simply remove it allowed to come to room temp feed it as normal some people like to reduce the amount of water a little bit but I just leave it the same it's fine then just let it ferment for one to two hours at room temperature and then place it in the fridge so you want to give it like an hour or two after you feed it before placing in the fridge just to get some activity going other than that that's pretty much it you could store it for a week now some people like to freeze their starters or dehydrate their starters those are also options for long-term storage in my opinion if I needed to store my starter for like three months I'm just gonna just throw it away and make a new one for God's sakes like I don't know I just think that it's excessive to do it at that point if you want to preserve a starter that's very special to you than I understand you want to do that there are plenty of resources online so that's it well not all of it this isn't exactly an all-inclusive maintenance guide per se because there's just too many things to cover I want it to be a quick little touch on all the variables that I think are super important that most people may not know about in the beginning girlfriend DM me on Instagram if you have any questions like I said in the link is below you can follow me DM me just let me know if you have questions and hey send me your sourdough starters coz I see someone who watches my video and then makes it makes a big big man they make the thing and that's pretty flippin cool now if you guys want to see any more sourdough things or anything in particular you want to see me do leave a comment below and if you enjoyed this video and maybe you learned something leave a like subscribe and I will see you next week [Music]

Channel: Joshua Weissman

Views: 625,819

Keywords: sourdough starter, how to create a sourdough starter, sourdough bread, sourdough starter guide, joshua weissman, youtube cooking series, youtube cooking show, sourdough recipe, how to make a sourdough starter, what is a sourdough starter, how to maintain a sourdough starter, bread, sourdough, sourdough starter maintenance, sat bawl pro, josh weissman, cooking, baking, food, joshua weissman sourdough, making sourdough starter, homemade sourdough starter

Id: ASD3uu2N5UE

Length: 6min 21sec (381 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 18 2018