How To Maintain A Sourdough Starter | Dear Test Kitchen

this is such a comforting smell like yeah and so like a warm like you couldn't bread is so comforting and that feels like the heart of all bread to me right now yeah welcome to food 52 Test Kitchen my name is Josh I'm here with Sarah Owens we're gonna be talking about sourdough starter which I know almost nothing about and you know a ton about it so I'm very excited we're gonna learn what is it how do you make it how do you keep it alive how do you use it and at the end of this video some of my food 52 co-workers have brought in their own sourdough starters we're gonna lift the lid and sort of see what's going on in there I don't know hardly anything what is a starter let's just begin with like yeah yeah yeah so a sourdough starter is really basic its flour and water okay but within this culture of flour and water we have primarily two different types of microbes while the yeasts which everyone sort of knows about when they think about a sourdough starter but also bacteria those things are working together they're like helping you gather out yeah what's interesting about a sourdough culture is that we have this bacteria and we don't have that with like the packets of yeast that you buy at the store right you're basically when you use that or when you buy that it's one strain of yeast they are you're using to leaven your bread with a sourdough culture you have both the bacteria and lots of different species of yeast the bacteria works to sort of pre digest the flour and as a byproduct of that fermentation it gives off lactic and acetic acids is that where flavor comes from that's where exactly see you know more than you think you do I really could give you this morning okay should we talk about what you brought today absolutely Sarah I brought three different starters I normally keep one but lately I've been using each of these for different applications in the kitchen this is my favorite I call it a piece okay it's a sourdough starter maintained with rye flour is there a story behind the name it's just a really vigorous very strong culture each one is gonna have a different aroma yeah and the Rye one often to me smells grassy kind of a little bit like honey so this one I love to use for making bread I think rye the enzymes and rye have a very particular relationship with the acidity of sourdough very beneficial so just using a little bit of rye there in your starter or your eleven it goes into your bread dough I think really encourages fermentation so that's my favorite one to use for a bread dough so you it did you say eleven just for people who don't know eleven it's really just a semantics thing leaven is the intermediate step between your starter and your bread dough so you're always using some of the starter to make leaven but you're keeping some behind the leaven you use all of it in your recipe the leaven become a spread yes and I could use it for everything but I find that this guy or lady this is princess okay so this is also made from bread flour totally a different no mom very different you can tell I don't know if you can actually see but the surface of this sourdough starter has more of a bubbly kind of viscous appearance so these are both maintained with the same ratio of water to flour so this one I use a lot because I make other things besides bread while we're on the subject what are a few things that you would use a starter for besides bread I love to make crackers sourdough pancakes waffles basically anything that you make you can with a little sourness anything that would be a dough a dough a batter so you can whip it into cakes often when I make cookies I'll just at the creaming stage I'll just spare a little bit in and make sure it's whipped into that stage before absolute dry ingredients like noticeable and the end result it can be subtle it can be strong it depends on how long after you mix the dough or batter that you let it sit before baking sounds like they're sort of infinite possibilities for experimenting here is yeah there is a little wiggle room like certain areas of food where you could spend a lifetime learning and still it's like the tip of the iceberg yeah yeah and I've been doing this a long time and I still am learning and part of that is also just learning how to break the rules a lot of people think this is a really strict sort of thing that they do the wrong step they're gonna kill their starter but it's really just learning the keys of fermentation so that you can tweak it to be whatever you need it to be for your schedule and your preference it's interesting so I just want to introduce you to one last time starter this is my brown rice starter it has a really different aroma it reminds me I mean I've sometimes I've seen like jasmine rice in tap water and strained out and like just your drinking water has like a little bit of a floral flavor yeah yeah so these are the three starters that I keep so if you made a bread with a brown rice starter and you made another bread with a rye starter how different would they be in flavor texture yeah they're quite different so I used this one primarily to make a gluten-free sourdough okay kind of dense you can slice it really thinly but if I make wheat bread using the rice starter or 11 as opposed to the wheat starter or 11 I do notice a discernible difference in the complexity of the flavor is the right one a little more complex I think it's more complex yeah and it really doesn't take a lot to give it that difference yeah we talked about the benefits of sourdough starter let's say you're someone with no starter at all how do you begin like where do you start are you ready I'm ready okay which starter would you like to use to create yours you know I'm a native New Yorker so I feel like I have to go with the beast all right okay so basically to create a sourdough starter you can do it in several different ways you can do it from scratch using flour and water you can buy a starter from different online sources either a dehydrated or in a liquid form there's a lots of different ways to approach this the easiest way is just for someone to give you some okay that's what we're gonna do today so you've got your jar yeah all right so let's turn on the scale bring it to zero grams sure and way your jar the reason why I like to do this stuff is because when you move on to maintenance so if you know the weight of your jar you can just set your jar with a starter in it on the scale subtract the weight of the jar and then you know how much so like write down the weight of your jar memorize it yeah it's really a good idea to keep a journal yeah when you're first starting with sourdough to be able to take notes of the temperature the time of day how you're feeling so to get started we're gonna maintain I create and maintain our new sourdough starter using equal parts by weight okay so go ahead and take out 50 grams of starter and put it in your new jar okay and now we're gonna add 50 grams of water use your spoon just kind of stir that up so to break up the starter that's gonna be make it easier for you to disperse the right starter and new culture you just want to get it kind of like a into a slurry and now it's time to feed it flour okay alright so we're doing equal parts so much flour are you gonna feed it well 50 grams again exactly would you give it just like exclusively rye flour I would I think it's important to choose a type of flour that you're gonna use and stick with that again a lot of the microbes that we're culturing or on the flower itself right so if you can be as consistent as possible in your bread prep press so that it has an identity exactly okay so you just fed it 50 grams yeah flour and that's equal parts by weight to the weight of the starter right now we could if we wanted to so we could always over feed our server starter we could give it a hundred grams of flour what we never want to do is under feed the starter or feed it less flour than the weight of the starter it needs at least the weight of the starter if not more so what you need to do next is stir up the flour water starters the starches are converting to sugars the microbes wake up and they start feeding okay so they need time in order to feed so once you get that really stirred up well keep stirring and make sure you really get it off the bottom and into the top no dry flour remaining and then once you get it really stirred up and it looks like a consistent sort of paste try to use your spoon to kind of pack it down because what you want to be able to do especially when you're starting out is to be able to look on the side and see the fermentation activity and if you kind of push it down into one even layer before you position the lid then you're going to be able to watch that throughout the course of its feeding so go ahead and position the lid now that we've made this yet and the lid is on and not too tight you mm-hmm where do we store it okay so an ideal temperature for this deferment or eight to twelve hours is 75 degrees if it's a little warmer like it is right now it's just gonna encourage the fermentation to get a little faster if it's cooler in your house or in your kitchen then it's gonna slow down the fermentation that's why there's that window of 8 to 12 hours but basically what you're looking for is for the starter to at least double in size so that's the the carbon dioxide which is the byproducts of yeast fermentation is lifting the starter that's when you know it's active sometimes when you're first starting out with a new sourdough and you've not made bread very much before you can't remember the timing you're like was it six hours was it 12 hours this is just kind of a nice compass right to help you sort of observe the behavior of your starter okay so we're gonna perform the flow test we're gonna use a clean spoon to dip into the starter and we're gonna try not to like mix it up too much which would deflate it right so I'm just gonna grab a nice pop of starter and scoop it off into the water so we can see now it's floating and that's an indication that there's plenty of carbon dioxide gas is a byproduct of yeast fermentation that it's healthy and ready to live in our bread or to make 11:11 our bread okay so once we've performed a flute test and we know our starter is fully fed we have several different options take some of your starter to make either 11 or a recipe that calls for a refreshed starter another thing if you're kind of crunched on time you don't want to make another recipe you can stick it in the refrigerator okay so it's fully fed it's been sitting out for 8 to 12 hours you see that it floats or that it's doubled in size just plop it in the fridge okay make sure the lid is always loose so it can exhale that carbon dioxide when you put it in the fridge it's gonna go fairly dormant but it's still gonna be a little bit active just imperceptibly soon so always leave the lid a little bit loose let's say you're out of town so you have to be gone if like two weeks or something how do you maintain the health of your starter that way you're just gonna take it with you I'm kidding what I do there's a couple of different options what I do is I'll feed it twice back-to-back so I'll feed it in the morning let it ferment for eight to twelve hours feed it at night and then the next morning I put it in the fridge okay when I get back so say it's been 2 or 3 weeks when I get back I do that same thing it may take three feedings but my test is going to be again the float test what happens is in the fridge if it sits for a long time the acids start to build up you'll see like liquid forming on the top and that's when you know you need to do this like back-to-back feeding regardless of whether you're in or out of town because everybody keeps the refrigerator at different temperatures and it can affect the fermentation yeah I guess once you've had a starter for a while you sort of know how it's supposed to look and how supposed to smell exactly yeah it's the sort of thing where you have like a feel for it yes yeah and it helps if you name your starters because the more affectionate you are toward your starter the more likely you are to take better care of it all right so have you thought of a name I've been thinking about it I maybe I'll try and reveal it at that and I don't okay I don't have a good idea you can't have to get to know at first Yeah right like I barely even met my starter like I got maybe I need to spend some time with it yeah some quality time yes so we talked about the three starters that you brought in now we're gonna bring in two more starters that some people from the office of me and we consider a fun pair and like see how healthy there so we're here with Aaron and Joanna who have brought in their own sourdough starter we also have sourdough starter from the to my coworker Zoe and Dave who's behind the camera over there we're gonna open them all up we're gonna see how they're different how they're similar do like a little evaluation basically yeah cool so do you guys want to introduce your stores if it has a name when you fed it last what you feed it was just a little bit about your name you're like my starter actually came from Zoe starter here she gave it to me a few maybe about a month ago okay I've been feeding it mostly when I'm trying to make bread so sometimes every other weekend I fed it once this morning before I left from work and then when I got to the office okay and I usually use AP flour I tried some full wheat flour once and wait it down but I'm like a novice with all this stuff so I would love for you to and as it is it flower that you buy at the store or you get it from yeah no I get it from Whole Foods okay yeah I'll use like an unbleached flour okay cool and does it have a name no oh it's very so I would say this is very lactic which is kind of a way of saying it's very creamy and mile okay no I can it's fine I can speak very healthy because there are fermentation bubbles sort of popping through the surface it looks very billowy I can see fermentation bubbles on the side so this looks and smells like a very healthy starter I do not ever know a starter like what's the longest two starter people have brought me yeah people who brought me like their 100 year old starter that like their great-grandmother captain Alaska which you know honestly like a starter that's a month old it's gonna perform the same as a starter that's 100 years old as long as both are healthy so I smell it evaluate minds half-full eat and that's pretty much mm-hmm and smell that this has almost like a toasty aroma to you and then I think it's that whole wheat flour inclusion but it looks themselves so good so where do you keep your starter when you're not using it I keep it on the counter and like a Delhi Court says deli container covered with the cheesecloth and a rubber band just around the top and usually I feed it at night if I'm gonna make bread the next day so like oh if I'm gonna make bread them so they don't feed it like Thursday night Friday night Saturday night and then I'll feed it again on Wednesday Thursday to get it going for the next pant so if I'm making bread every week so if you store your starter on the counter and that's your regular schedule I think consistency is key you store it in the refrigerator again just kind of stick to the same but that's that's great same thing yeah in poor container I don't put the yeah so I think it's a good idea to just leave the lid kind of loose or popped to allow the carbon dioxide gas to exhale one thing I would suggest is to keep it in a glass or ceramic container just because a sourdough starter is very acidic and acidity will eat away at plastics so that's just one thing to kind of be aware of yeah so I actually have a whole resources page on my website for our Mills Oliver mostly the US and Canada yeah that's also a good question so again I'm using mostly stone-ground flour which has all of the germ oil present in the flour so it's really important to store that flour at cool or cold temperatures in order to maintain the integrity of the oils so I store mine if I'm not gonna go through it quickly either in the refrigerator or the freezer in China thanks for bringing your starters I was fun to get to talk about them yeah thank you it was really fun to get to see such a wide variety of like what a starter can be I think I like understand a little bit how like the thrill of baking coz one loaf of bread is never gonna be exactly the same as the next so we're wrapping up this episode about starters and I want to tease all the viewers out there to come and watch the next episode next week about sourdough bread if you want more videos like this if you want to see Sarah make some bread like and subscribe you [Music]

Channel: Food52

Views: 653,046

Rating: 4.8218312 out of 5

Keywords: Food52, food, cooking, recipe, chef, foodie, cook, home cooking videos, sourdough, sourdough starter, sourdough starter from scratch, starter, sourdough starter maintenance, sourdough starter with yeast, sarah owens, sarah owens sourdough, sourdough starter tips, sourdough starter tutorial, sourdough starter test

Id: QbeP4szTVU4

Length: 21min 26sec (1286 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 21 2019