NEW! - How to Create a Sourdough Starter : Step by Step

hi i'm tom coming to you from the internationally acclaimed sourdough baking institute of cleveland ohio also known as my kitchen thank you for selecting my video now i've made a number of videos on my youtube channel the sourdough journey but i have not made one that shows how to create a sourdough starter i created my starter about 11 months ago and i started making those videos shortly thereafter but i already had my starter created now we finally have the opportunity to see how a starter is created because i'm ready to create my second own sourdough starter so i'll take you through this entire process now before i go any further who is this video for this video is for beginners who want to create their sourdough starter for the first time i'll go through this in great detail if you're an experienced baker or you have an existing sourdough starter i have some other videos already created one that includes steps of how to maintain an existing sourdough starter i have a video that describes how to strengthen a weak sourdough starter and i have a humorous video called 50 ways to kill your starter that talks about all the ways people accidentally kill or try to kill their starter and how to save your starter from common mishaps in this video we'll start from the very beginning what is a sourdough starter how do you create one and then we'll get into a little bit of how you maintain it on an ongoing basis now the first step in sourdough baking is to get your hands on a sourdough starter there are many ways to do this you can buy a sourdough starter already pre-made on the internet there are places that sell them either in dehydrated form or in fresh form that's a perfectly acceptable way to get started if you have a friend who's a sourdough baker you could ask them to give you some of their starter and then you can cultivate that into your own you can go to a local bakery that makes sourdough bread and you could ask a bakery if they would give you some of their starter some bakeries are sensitive about this they don't give it out other bakeries are happy to give some of their sourdough starter to a baker now there are all kinds of starters out there in the world some sourdough starters have been handed down through generations there are people in the u.s who have sourdough starter cultures that they've been maintaining since the mid-1800s from the california gold rush there are people in europe who have 400 year old starters that have been handed down through generations and there was recently a person who went to egypt and took some dehydrated starter off of a baking vessel that was estimated to be 4500 years old reactivated that sourdough starter and baked bread using a 4 500 year old starter so it's a pretty amazing versatile and long lived microorganism that's been on the earth for over a billion years but if you cannot get your hands on a 4 500 year old egyptian baking vessel i'll show you the easy way to make a sourdough starter in your kitchen now what is a sourdough starter exactly a sourdough starter is a living biological culture of wild yeast and lactic acid bacteria this is the way bread has been made for over 4 000 years this started in the fertile crescent and in egypt where there are the first remnants of baking facilities found in archaeological locations there the egyptians initially mixed a porridge of water and wheat and they would eat that for sustenance and they would bake flat bread out of that because it wouldn't rise it didn't have the yeast in it and then some egyptian baker left some of his wet dough sitting out overnight and came back the next day or two days later and found this wet porridge had basically doubled in size and all of a sudden this egyptian baker had discovered the yeast that creates a sourdough culture that leavens or rises the bread so then now they had this magic porridge that would double in size overnight and by keeping some of that wet porridge overnight day after day after day you could maintain this magic porridge that would be doubling and bubbly and would cause flat bread to turn into risen or leavened bread that's really how bread originated what we're creating is that culture of yeast and other microbes that are exactly the same as what was done four thousand years ago when the first 11 bread was discovered so from ancient times up to the 20th century people used a sourdough culture to make bread what's in a sourdough culture two basic microorganisms one is yeast the yeast is what causes the bread to rise and lactic acid bacteria lactic acid bacteria is what assists the yeast in the fermentation process and it gives sourdough bread that tangy flavor it's essentially it's creating two types of acid lactic acid which is the tangy flavor that you get in yogurt for example and acetic acid which is the biting acidic acidic flavor that you get in vinegar for example the lactic acid bacteria is creating both of those things the yeast is creating ethanol which is a alcohol that's why yeast is used in brewing and creating wine and things of that nature but it's also creating carbon dioxide carbon dioxide basically fills your dough with air and that's what causes the bread to rise so the two things that you're trying to grow in your culture are the yeast which rises the dough and the lactic acid bacteria which gives it that signature sour flavor now this is the way bread was made for centuries this was great for using it to bake bread in small bakeries but in the 20th century when people decided it would be better to make bread in a factory this is a very unpredictable way to make bread in a factory so that's when commercial yeast was created commercial yeast was created in a laboratory by taking all the strains of wild yeast from sourdough cultures and finding the one strongest most robust and most stable species or strain of yeast and they isolated that and reproduced that in a factory and that's what you get in these little baggies this is one strain of yeast that's been separated from the lactic acid bacteria and reproduced in a factory and it does one thing really well it basically eats sugar and creates carbon dioxide so when scientists created commercial yeast in a factory they were able to separate for the first time since the beginning of time they separated yeast from its symbiotic partner the lactic acid bacteria and they were able to separate those two so now you can buy yeast in a bag that doesn't include lactic acid bacteria but that's why bread that you eat now non-sourdough bread commercially yeasted bread just doesn't taste very good because you took out the flavor enhancers of the lactic acid bacteria that gives sourdough that unique flavor so that's why we create our own starter because it does two things one it uses wild yeast to rise the dough and along with that wild yeast comes its symbiotic partner the lactic acid bacteria which gives the sourdough its unique flavor so the two microbes that are in the sourdough starter yeast and lactic acid bacteria these have traveled together through the history of time going back millions of years when you find one you find the other because they have a symbiotic relationship they both eat similar foods starches and sugars the lactic acid bacteria consume some sugars and gives them off in a different format that allows the yeast to then eat them and digest them the yeast gives off alcohol and carbon dioxide the lactic acid bacteria creates acid and the two of those together create an environment that's perfectly suited for the two of them to exist but because it's acidic and it's alcoholic it basically fends off other microbes so it creates an environment where you can let a sourdough start or sit on your countertop non-refrigerated for a really long period of time and mold won't grow in it other pathogens won't grow in it other bacteria won't grow in it because these two microorganisms have created this perfect environment that they cohabitate in symbiotically and they keep out other bacteria so what are the ingredients that we need to create a sourdough starter you need two ingredients flour and water now there are sourdough recipes on the internet where people talk about all kinds of other ingredients that you want to add to your sourdough starter they'll talk about adding sugar honey pineapple juice kefir raisin water all kinds of crazy stuff you don't need any of those things all you need is flour and water so you might ask the question well if i just start with flour and water where does the yeast come from if i'm not adding it the yeast is already attached to the flour now when you create a sourdough starter the yeast theoretically can come from three places the yeast is already on the flower because the east is everywhere there's yeast on my counter there's yeast in wheat fields there's yeast in the back of a truck that the wheat berries were dumped into the yeast is already everywhere in the environment and where you have yeast you have lactic acid bacteria with it so in this bag of flour i already have the other ingredients that i need the yeast cells and the lactic acid bacteria cells they're just dormant because this is dry so that's the primary place where your yeast comes from is it's already in this bag the second place the yeast comes from is it's in the air so when you're mixing a sourdough starter some people will say you need to leave it open to the air so that all the yeast that's in the air can get into your sourdough starter very very little of the the yeast that ultimately is in your starter comes from the air you could make a sourdough starter by completely sealing up your jar airtight it's a completely anaerobic process meaning it doesn't need oxygen it does not need yeast from the air you don't need to leave the top open you don't need to put it outside you don't need to try to attract yeast into your jar of your starter culture and then the third place where yeast comes from is from the baker's hands this is interesting there have been some studies that show that people who work in bakeries for long periods of time actually have yeast all over their bodies and they'll have yeast in their hands and they'll have enough yeast in the crevices of their hands where you could actually theoretically take sterile flour and if somebody rubbed their hands on the sterile flower they have enough yeast on their hands that it would be able to create a sourdough culture off of a baker's hands i tend to wash my hands a little bit more frequently and i don't bake bread that often so i don't think i could start a sourdough culture off of my hands but you'll hear people say that as well and that has been proven to be true but 99.9 of the yeast that we need for our sourdough culture is already attached to the flower now let's talk about making the starter the recipe and process that i use is from chad robertson's tartine bread sourdough baking book this has a recipe and a process for how to create the starter on page 45. this is also available on the tartine bakery website you can find the recipe for the basic country loaf which is the standard recipe in this book it also has in that recipe how to create the starter it's the same thing that's in the book that's what i'm going to be following here he does not give precise measurements for a couple of the ingredients so i'm going to add some specific measurements here in the video to help out the beginners who wouldn't know what a handful of flour would equal in terms of grams for example so let's follow this recipe as i mentioned there are two ingredients we need to make our starter we need flour and water now according to the tartine recipe the flour that's recommended is a 50 50 mix of bread flour and whole wheat flour now i recommend following this mix to get your starter going once you get your starter established and you want to maintain your starter on an ongoing basis you can change up your mix of flowers if you prefer but really to get it established i strongly recommend following this mix so what i'm using is for my bread flour i'm using central milling company organic artisan baker's craft flour this is a bread flour from the central milling company and for the whole wheat flour i'm using central milling company organic whole wheat high protein medium grind flour so 50 bread flour 50 whole wheat flour now we're going to need to add this mixture into the starter every day for say seven to ten days so what i recommend is rather than dragging out two bags of flour every day is make a blend of this to start so i'll do that right here so what i prefer to do is to use these plastic containers this holds about three cups or 750 milliliters and i'll mix up 50 of the bread flour 50 of the whole wheat flour i can fit about 350 grams of flour in here with a little bit of spare room i know that from experience so i'm going to add 175 grams of bread flour and 175 grams of whole wheat flour now this is a pre-mix i leave a little bit of room in the top and this will last me for about a week of feeding the starter so i leave some room in the top so that i have room to shake shake shake and mix these together so what i'm doing is creating my 50 50 blend of bread flour and whole wheat flour now i don't need to get my bags out every day i don't have to spill flour everywhere this is a much cleaner easier way to do your daily maintenance of your starter so we have our 50 50 mix of our flowers i label my container here so i know that i have 50 percent of the artisan baker's craft flour fifty percent of the whole wheat flour the second ingredient that i need is water so people often ask the question what type of water is best to use for your sourdough starter the answer is you should use non-chlorinated water now there are many different ways to get non-chlorinated water what i just did is i have chlorinated water coming through my tap from my municipal water supply but i have a filter on my refrigerator that filters the chlorine out of it so i have non-chlorinated water now you can take chlorinated water you can let it sit on your countertop overnight and the chlorine will aerate off of the water you can boil it and you can boil chlorine off of the water you can buy bottled water you can buy spring water you could use distilled water people don't recommend using distilled water because that stripped all the minerals out of the water and then one other thing to remember is that if you're using municipal water and you're filtering it you should find out what type of chlorination is in your water because there are two types that are used at least in the u.s now one is chlorine and the other is chloramine chloramine is a combination of chlorine and ammonia that's actually more stable than chlorine but it's harder to get that out of your water so if you have chloramine in your water the only way to get that out is by boiling it for i believe 20 minutes you could check with your local municipality to see what they recommend for removing chloramine from your water because it's not filtered out through normal household filters and it does not aerate off by leaving it on your counter and it does not boil off by simply bringing it to a boil you have to boil it for a longer period of time than that now some people will say that they read on the internet or a friend told them that they can use chlorinated tap water to create their starter and it'll work out just fine if you use chlorinated tap water to create your starter the goal of your starter is to basically grow bacteria in a jar and if you add chlorine into your jar where you're trying to grow bacteria it's just like adding household bleach to your starter which according to the label says kills 99.9 of germs and bacteria why would i want to put that in my starter it doesn't make any sense make sure your water is not chlorinated other people will say well my friend said they just used tap water in their starter tap water can mean 100 different things some people's tap water comes from a mountain spring some people's tap water is from a well that's been filtered through reverse osmosis filtration some people's tap water includes chlorine some includes chloramine some doesn't so when people say they use tap water just ignore that because it doesn't mean anything everybody's tap water can be different figure out what's in your water take the chlorine out it's the best way to do it now we talked about the type of flour that we want to use so we're using half bread flour half whole wheat flour but what we didn't talk about is where your flour comes from now this is where things get really interesting now there are about a half dozen different strains of yeast that you'll find in a wire wild sourdough culture and there are probably 30 different strains of lactic acid bacteria in sourdough cultures from all around the world there are people who research this so when you create your first sourdough culture as i mentioned the vast majority of the yeast and lactic acid bacteria is coming from the flower that you're using now when i created my first starter i used mostly king arthur flower king arthur is a popular flower company in vermont in the united states so i used king arthur flour so my yeast and lactic acid bacteria came from king arthur from vermont and from i'm guessing the east coast i don't know exactly where all the flower comes from they could be sourcing it from all over the u.s typically let me just call this my east coast flower and then i fed this over time with other flowers but mostly king arthur flowers so this is what i call my cleveland starter this is cle that's the short name for the airport code that's what the young people down in the 2 1 6 call it cle but what i'm going to create now is i want to create a california starter i want to experiment and see if i buy flour from california would that actually create a different strain of yeast and different strains of lactic acid bacteria than i than what i have here in the cle so my new starter is going to be called cali i was going to write california on here but i didn't make enough room on my tape so this one's called cali and what i'm going to do is use only flour that comes from california these are from the central milling company in petaluma california and i'm assuming that this flower was sourced from california if it wasn't don't tell me because i want to believe that and most importantly i want my starter to believe that the water that i'm using is filtered water from cleveland but i assume that that wouldn't impact the outcome because you're not getting yeast or lactic acid bacteria from the water it's all coming from the flower i'm going to keep the lid on this so that i'm not introducing local yeasts and lactic acid bacterias into this as much as possible and lastly i really want to convince this starter that it's in california so i grew my hair out long i'm trying to learn how to surf i really want this starter to think it lives in california so we're going to create a california starter today in cleveland ohio okay we're ready to mix up our starter you need a vessel that you want to mix it in i recommend these straight sided canning jars these are called ball jars from the united states this is one pint or about 500 milliliters i prefer a straight sided vessel so that you can get your spoon in there to scrape down the sides i originally tried using something like this this is really tough because you can't get your spoon in there to scrape it down and the starter gets all gunked up and crusty around that lid so don't over complicate things with that you could use a clear plastic container you could use something like this you'll want to have something that you could put a loose or tight fitting lid on so i use these plastic lids that you can buy separately with these canning jars these come with the two-part metal lids i don't like the two-part lids i just buy these plastic replacements so the first step is to combine flour and water the recipe calls for a very imprecise measurement he says to fill up the container halfway and then add handfuls of flour until it creates a thick batter that's a very imprecise measurement system so what i would recommend is let's start with 75 grams of flour and 75 grams of water so i have my flour blend here now this quantity is somewhat arbitrary just based on my experience but i'm recommending 75 grams of flour and i have my filtered non-chlorinated water i'm adding 75 grams of that there we are so we have a total of 150 grams of new starter in a clean jar now i'm going to mix this up you want to mix this really thoroughly and it should create what chad robertson calls is a thick batter with no lumps so i can see there are no lumps in here but what's a thick batter i mean a thick batter is a very subjective term here's how i define a thick batter i can go like this i can turn this upside down and it won't pour out that's a definition in my book of a good mix for a starter so that's it that's all there is to it for mixing your flour and water now i'm going to put a lid on this but i'm not going to seal it tightly so i'm going to let a little bit of air in here even though it's not required this would work in an anaerobic oxygen free environment but i screw this lid on then i just back it off slightly to leave a little bit of air space in there so i don't want foreign objects kind of falling down into my starter dust or things like that because that could introduce other pathogens in here but i'm going to leave a little air space to let some of the carbon dioxide out and let a little bit of oxygen in there even though you don't need oxygen now the recipe says keep this in a cool dark place for two to three days very important why is it important to keep it in a cool place because i'm trying to grow my yeast and my lactic acid bacteria and there are other bacteria in the starter right now you might not realize it because when you buy a bag of flour it's white and it looks real clean flour is a raw food it is not a sterilized food so you're getting basically whatever was in the wheat field is in that bag and it can include all kinds of other bacteria let me just put it that way those are in my starter now so what's going to happen here in the first few days of your starter is there is an epic battle going on in this jar where the yeast and the lactic acid bacteria are trying to fight off all the other bacteria that's in that flower and you want the yeast and lactic acid bacteria to win that race so what what you want is a relatively cool temperature i'm going to put this in an upstairs room here where my temperature is about 69 degrees 68 degrees fahrenheit or 20 degrees celsius what that'll do is it'll let the yeast get established and it'll slow down the development of some of these other bacteria and allow the yeast to get a little bit of a head start because the other bacteria far outnumber the yeast cells if you put this in a warm environment sometimes bad stuff will happen and all the other bacteria will take over before the yeast has a chance to establish itself so that's the reason we want a cool environment you also want to keep it in a dark place similarly just to keep that sunlight out so you don't get the sunlight accelerating the development of everything anything so i'm going to cover this with a dark towel i'm going to put this in one of my cool rooms and we're going to come back and check this each day but this will take about two to three days where you don't want to touch this you don't want to stir it you don't want to do anything to it i'm going to open the jar once a day i'm going to inspect what's in there i'll show you how it looks but you don't want to add anything to it you just want to let it sit for about two to three days okay it's day two it's been 24 hours since we mixed our starter let's take a look now the first thing that i do is i want to smell this as soon as i open this jar now this still smells like bread flour it smells like wheat i'm not really smelling a lot more than that in here now but as we look in here let's see what it looks like now as you look down into this jar you'll see some dark areas that's just a shadow coming through the side of this jar because of this printing on the jar that's not a discoloration of the starter it's all the same basically cream color it's just casting a shadow on it so what i do see here is what i expected is i see a few bubbles that's a good sign bubbles means life there's some life in our starter but it's pretty flat the smell hasn't changed very much pretty much what i would expect after 24 hours let's check this again tomorrow it's day three 48 hours since we initially mixed this let's take a look now we've got some action happening here this is a good sign so this will typically happen around day three or day four this is where this battle among all the microbes that are in here is going on and you're seeing this frothy bubbling on the top of this very typical after two or three days and now let's look at the side view there's something really important here you can see those small streaks on the side of the jar show that this actually rose and fell now that's just evidence of a lot of bacterial activity happening in the jar and this is what people call is evidence that the bad bacteria is burning off you'll see this frothy thin milky type of froth on the top of it this is very typical now some people will also get tricked at this point and they'll say oh my gosh my starter it's been going for two days and it's already doubling in size i saw it rise i'm going to bake some bread you don't want to bake bread with this because this still has foreign pathogens in it that are not healthy for humans to eat so you'll see this activity and sometimes be deceived and thinking that this is the yeast activity it's not it's all the bacteria fighting in here and just giving off their different byproducts so you don't want to be eating this stuff on day two or day three let's cover it for one more day see what it looks like tomorrow okay it's day four 72 hours since we mixed this up let's take a look now this smells more vinegary today so that means that the lactic acid bacteria is now giving off its byproduct of acetic acid so now if we look down in here this looks different than it looked yesterday it's flattened out you see small bubbles all around here and it's lost that frothiness that's a good sign because this is what an immature starter should look like just kind of that flat with those pinhole sized bubbles on the top so on day four now we're ready to start feeding this so this set for 72 hours from when we initially mixed it it may take one extra day may take one less day but when it starts to flatten out like this and look like it's settling in with those small pinhole size bubbles we're ready to feed this and start moving into the next stage of building our starter which is feeding so now that we're entering the next phase of building our starter which is the daily feeding we need to understand the concept of starter feeding ratios the feeding ratio is typically expressed as three numbers so it's three numbers in series separated by two colons and what this is is the ratio of the first number which is your starter that you want to keep the second number is the ratio of flour that you want to add the third number is the ratio of water that you want to add so if i wanted to keep equal parts starter flour and water i would do a one one one ratio that means equal parts starter equal parts flour equal parts water the tartine recipe as you're building your starter recommends a one two two ratio so we're gonna have one part starter two parts flour and two parts water now you have to determine how many grams do you want in that first number that's how you determine the second number and the third number what i recommend is to keep 25 grams of your existing starter so that's going to be the one in the one two two ratio so that's 25 grams of starter 50 grams of flour 50 grams of water the second and third number are ratios off of the first number so it's one part starter two parts flour two parts water now i have 150 grams of starter in this jar right now if you remember we began this process by adding 75 grams of water and 75 grams of flour i only need 25 grams of this to continue so i'm going to discard 125 grams of my existing starter and i'm going to keep 25 grams going forward and you'll get the hang of this we're going to do it every day we're going to discard a portion and we're going to keep a portion so i need to keep 25 grams i could create a second jar and take out 25 grams and put it into a second jar and then go from there but i'm out of jars so i need to get this out of this jar put 25 grams back in and then start from there in the same jar so what i'm going to do is just pour this out into this little red bowl completely empty this jar then i can set this on my scale set the scale to zero and then add back 25 grams of my starter into this which is all i want to keep so let me do that so when i pour this out this is really liquefied over that three day period that it's been sitting there so this actually pours out almost the consistency of paint so i've emptied out my jar completely i put it into this separate bowl now i can reset my jar to zero on my scale and now i just want to add in 25 grams of this to go forward so i have 25 grams that's the first number in my feeding ratio that's the one equals 25 so now if i want to add two times flour and two times water to that i get my blend so you can remember we mixed up our blend here very easy i don't have to get my bags out so now i want to add 2 times 25 flour so that would be 50 grams of flour and i want to add two times that 25 grams of starter as water so i'm keeping my flour water ratios the same so i add 50 grams of water there we are so that's my new feeding ratio one two two which is 25 50 50. 25 grams of gold starter 50 grams of flour 50 grams of water we're gonna do this every day for about a week and then i like to wipe off the rim of the jar because you'll get some really crusty nasty stuff around the top of that you want to keep the sides scraped down completely really keep that starter down in the bottom of your jar keep your sides clean this is a great tool that somebody recommended this is called a spoonala i guess because its mother is a spoon and its father is a spatula but it basically works like a spoon for scooping out the flour and it also has this flexible tip for scraping down the sides spoon perfect tool for this process okay now we also changed something else here now that we've fed this it's starting to establish itself as a sourdough culture so i don't need to keep this at a cool room temperature anymore i can keep this at a warm room temperature so really the optimal temperature for a sourdough starter is between 76 degrees fahrenheit and 82 degrees fahrenheit that's 24.4 degrees celsius and 27.8 degrees celsius so in my kitchen my kitchen's a little bit cooler than that but on top of my refrigerator where the compressor throws off a little bit of heat it's a little warmer on top of my refrigerator than it is just sitting on my countertop my countertop is about 74 degrees fahrenheit or 23 degrees celsius so i keep my starters up on top of my fridge so now that we've started daily feeding we also want to start to monitor the starter to see if it's rising so after i fed this i put this rubber band around here i just took a rubber band and colored it black with marker around here so now i'm going to watch this throughout the day and see if the starter rises throughout the day okay i've been watching the starter throughout the day we're eight hours since i did the one two two feeding this starter is doubling now after eight hours here's what it looks like you can see the rubber band shows where we started it's clearly doubled in height you can see i had this on my refrigerator at 77.78 degrees fahrenheit that's about 25 25 and a half degrees celsius so we're getting a really good rise here where it's doubling in height eight hours is a little bit of a long time for your starter to double we want to see that happening in about four hours and that's really the indication that our starter is ready but day four is really early in this process normally this would take six seven or eight days now it did not happen with this batch of starter but another thing that's very common when you're making a new starter is that between days three four and five you'll really get a quiet period with the starter where it looks like it's not doing anything it'll just sit there flat don't panic don't try to do anything to it don't try to add anything to it just stick with the daily feeding maintenance and just have patience that's all i can say this one happened to be very active on day four that's a little bit uncommon usually day four is a quiet day so now it's day five so the last time we saw this yesterday on day four it had doubled in height after about eight hours now look at it the next day on day five it's completely flattened out again you see those bubbles on top that's a good sign that it's alive but this is the typical starter feeding cycle so you feed it it'll rise over four to eight hour period then it'll gradually come back down and it flattens out and bubbles so when it flattens out like that what that means is it's consumed all the food and it's ready for another feeding so this is what i would call a hungry starter where it's really flattened out again and you see all those little pinpoint holes on the top now what you don't want to see is a starving starter your starter is starving when it's completely flat there are very few bubbles on the top and you start to see a thin layer of what's called hooch which is ethanol or alcohol that's a byproduct that the yeast gives off after it's consumed all the starches and sugars in the flour so now every day we do the one two two feeding again so i'm going to pour off all but 25 grams of this and then add 50 grams of flour 50 grams of water same thing that we did yesterday now like i said you can use two jars or you should also weigh your jar before you put your starter in it i know that this weighs 285 grams so i can pour this off and i know that if it weighs 310 grams i have 25 grams of starter left in it that's also another way to get at your starting point and then you also want to discard that remaining starter you don't want to keep that once your starter is established after say 10 days to 2 weeks you can start saving your discard and there are all kinds of recipes that you can use for starter discard you can find those on the king arthur website they have a a lot of different ideas for how to use it but in this first week or two you want to make sure that all that bad bacteria has burned itself off of your starter so don't hang on to your discard just keep the 25 grams and get rid of the rest each day i put mine into my compost bin i like to think of that as some of the yeast is being released into the wild because in the future its cousins that remain are going to burn up in a fiery death in my oven when i use them to bake bread so i like to let some of the yeast kind of go back to nature by putting that in my compost so it's been six hours since i fed the starter earlier today now let's take a look at this because this has now doubled in six hours yesterday it took eight hours to double today it took six hours that's what you want to see that's the sign of a strengthening starter is the ability for it to double in height after a one two two feeding ideally in four hours we're not quite there yet but we're getting there now here's day six before our feeding let's take a look now what you can see here is this is very flat very bubbly it's a little more liquefied than we saw yesterday that's a good sign that's a sign that the starter is strengthening because it's eating even more and more of the starches and sugars in the flour when it really starts to liquefy you get that shimmery kind of liquid on top that's the ethanol or the alcohol that means that this starter is eating all the food that it has and we might have to actually increase the feeding ratio at some point if it gets any worse than this but it is just now perfectly eating the amount of food that we're giving it okay day six i fed this starter four hours ago take a look at this it's amazing so this starter has more than doubled in four hours on day six after i created it that is a very quick strengthening of a starter it's uncommon so if you're mixing your starter and it's not quite there yet this is what i would typically see day seven day eight day nine day ten this starter really came on strong here so this is really quick for a starter six days to have your starter double in size like that within a four hour feeding that's really the test of when your starter is ready when it can double in height within four hours after a one two two feeding that starter is really strong now given that it's only day six that's kind of early to be using a starter i would recommend that you keep feeding this through day seven day eight day 9 day 10. usually 7 to 10 days is the recommended time before you want to use a starter in baking this one is doing really well at day 6 but i would still give it a little bit more time because it's not just the rise of the starter that you're looking for it's also developing the flavor of lactic acid bacteria so this could sufficiently rise a loaf right now but it might not really have that flavor that you're looking for so i'm going to keep feeding this for a few more days so the starter rose and fell on day six now it's day seven now if you take a look at this now you wanna smell this every day as well the smells are gonna change over time and and you'll get all different types of smell in your starter someday it smells beautiful like a yeasty bread factory some days it smells like vinegar some days it smells like stinky cheese or a locker room it just goes through different phases and it'll it'll change some very different smells over uh you know day to day depending what temperature it's at uh can have a lot to do with the type of odor that's coming off of it don't panic if the smell changes the smell is really not an indication of whether it's good or bad it just goes through different cycles depending on whether the lactic acid is dominating or the acetic acid is dominating or the alcohol byproduct of the uh yeast is dominating so you'll get some different smells coming out of your starter but now you can see on day seven this is really flattened out very small pinpoint holes it's getting to the point where it's almost starving it's just barely making it through this feeding cycle with enough food when it really flattens out and starts to liquefy like that so i'm gonna do another one two two feeding today and then check this tomorrow and see if if we need to increase the feeding ratio or not so it's day eight now the starter is continuing to strengthen it's rising and falling but take a look at what it looks like now before i feed it super liquefied on top that's ethanol or hooch that's basically alcohol that means the yeast is starving so look how liquidy this is so what you can see here is that this starter does not have enough food to last 24 hours until the next feeding using that one two two ratio it's just barely running out of food that's a good sign because it means i have a strong yeast population the yeast has been reproducing through these seven or eight days there's just more yeast in here so it's eating more of the starches and sugars in the flour so we have to think about do we change the feeding ratio so let's talk about starter feeding ratios now so now if your starter is doubling like mine is after a one two two feeding you're well on your way to having a great sourdough starter now you move into the maintenance phase of managing your starter and the key thing is to figure out what you want to do in terms of your daily feeding ratio so we built the starter using a one two two feeding ratio and that's just barely enough food for the starter to make it 24 hours my old starter clee from cleveland this one works fine with a 1-1-1 feeding ratio so every day i take equal parts starter i do 25 grams of starter 25 grams of flour 25 grams of water it's just not as strong or as hungry of a starter it's part of the reason that i built this new one so when you think about the feeding ratio what you're really trying to do is to say if i want to do daily maintenance of my starter which means i'm going to feed it once a day keep it at room temperature on my countertop for example the feeding ratio is trying to figure out what's the optimal amount of food that you need to give your starter until you get to the next feeding so i use what i call the camping analogy so when you think of those three numbers in the starter ratio one two two in this example the first number is the population or the number of campers that you're sending out on a camping trip the second number is the number of meals that you're sending with them and the third number is the amount of water that you're sending with them so in a one two two ratio for each camper i send two meals and two bottles of water for my one one one ratio i send one camper with one meal and one bottle of water these campers come back and they haven't starved to death they're fine using 1-1-1 in my cleveland starter my california starter this is a little hungrier it needs one two two when i send the campers out i gotta send two meals and two bottles of water with each one of them now when these guys came back they are extremely hungry as we could see on that video of what that looked like where all the sugars had been consumed and you can start to see that alcohol forming on the top so then i asked the question if one two two is just barely enough then i go up to one 133 or i could go one 2.5 2.5 but just to keep it easy my next feeding i'll try one part starter so my 25 grams of starter but now i need to send three meals and three bottles of water so i do 75 grams of flour and 75 grams of water and then i check it the next morning to see did i give it too much food did i give it not enough food what did the campers look like when they came back so i did a 1-3-3 feeding on this and when it came back 24 hours later that was more than enough food it was still actually kind of pasty and i just didn't like the way that it looked when i came when it came back with that 133 feeding it was just too much food and and you're just ending up wasting flour if it's not kind of coming back in that hungry state you want it to be hungry which is flat and bubbly but not starving which is hoochie and liquefied so i'm gonna go back to the one two two feeding and monitor this for a while one two two typically works one of the other things that's happening here as you can see from the thermometers that i'm using this is at a pretty warm temperature right now 78 79 degrees fahrenheit which is about 26 degrees celsius that also impacts the speed at which the starter eats the food so i'm gonna take this back down to one two two and monitor it for a while i just didn't like the way that it it looked with the 133 it was too pasty and it didn't need that much food so if your starter is doubling in height after say four five six hour feeding consistently at that one two two ratio and your starter is at least seven days old your starter is ready to bake bread with i would just try it and see how it goes it will continue to strengthen over time it really takes in my experience about 30 days for the starter to come to full strength and that's not just the ability for it to rise but also the ability to develop that flavor the lactic acid bacteria takes a little bit of time to kind of equalize with your yeast in your starter after 30 days the starter really settles in in my experience so good luck with your starter if you have other questions i have three other videos you might want to check out one how to maintain your starter that goes through in detail how to do the daily maintenance number two is how to strengthen a weak starter if your starter ever goes through a phase where it just starts to peter out and lose its strength i have some tips for how to strengthen a weak starter and number three is a humorous but educational video called 50 ways to kill your starter that talks about all the common mishaps that people have where they accidentally kill their starter and i show many ways where you can revive a starter that you didn't actually kill but it certainly looked like it good luck with your baking and thank you for watching my video you

Channel: The Sourdough Journey

Views: 243,443

Keywords: sourdough starter, mother, how to make sourdough starter, starter, fermentation, yeast, lactic acid, cleveland, california, cucuzza, tom, black shirt, tartine, chad robertson, tartine method, how to make sourdough, sourdough bread, leaven, starter and leaven

Id: n3Ge23tfzsA

Length: 51min 53sec (3113 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 21 2020