The Complete Sourdough Starter Guide

today I want to share with you the complete sourdough starter guide you don't need a scale you don't need a thermometer you don't need a proofing box none of that all you need is some flour and some water and any flour will do this is the perfect guide to get started if you're a beginner hi sweet friends I'm Mary and welcome to Mary's nest where I teach traditional cooking skills from making nutrient-dense foods like bone broth ferments and sourdough so if you enjoy learning about those things consider subscribing to my channel and don't forget to click on the little notification bell below that'll let you know every time I upload a new video well I've received many questions about sourdough starter and baking sourdough bread and today I want to share with you a very easy way to make a sourdough starter and all you need is some all-purpose flour and some water nothing fancy people of making sourdough starter for thousands of years so I'm confident that pretty much anybody can do this and what I'm recommending today is just to use all-purpose flour and water now in a previous video I shared with you how I make my foolproof sourdough starter using rye flour and the reason I use rye flour is it's much easier to get a sourdough starter going when you use rye flour but many of you have shared with me you can't find rye flour or you don't like rye flour and you don't want to make rye bread or whatever the case may be and I've asked me to show you how to do this just using all-purpose flour now one thing I want to say and this is my starter here that is made with rye flour that even if you decide you want to start your sourdough starter we're using rye flour because maybe you find that it is easier to do you can transition it to any type of starter you want when you make the transition and I have a video on that which I'll link to yeah you just start feeding it the flour that you want to so I could transition this if I wanted by starting to feed it with all-purpose flour but if you just want to start right from the beginning using all-purpose flour that's what we're going to do today now don't worry you don't need you don't need to weigh the flour and the water to make sure that you have exactly the proper hydration and so on and so forth will explain hydration in a minute what you can do is to scoop your flour into a cup and today I'm just using a half-measure cup you can start your starter just using tablespoons of flour you can start it using a half a cup of flour you can even start using a whole cup of flour it really doesn't matter it's whatever amount that you want to start your starter with and how much flour you then want to be feeding it with I often have a lot of sourdough starter because I enjoy actually baking with just sourdough starter so when I go to quote-unquote discard my sourdough starter when I feed it I don't actually discard what I'm removing I usually bake with it and I'll make flatbread or pancakes or different things like that I have a number of videos on what to do with discarded sourdough starter and I'll link to those in case that's something that you're interested in but in any event you just want to scoop it in like this rather than just scooping out a whole bunch with the half cut with the half cup measure if you take a teaspoon and just put it into the cup you'll get closer to the amount of water that you're also going to put in the half cup measure so then we're just going to level that off nothing fancy and we're going to put that into this vessel I like using a little flat bottom bowl like this you can use a round bottom bowl or you can even use a canning jar if you want any type of canning jar but I like to use some type of bowl because I find that it aerates nicely and I believe in my humble opinion that you'll have a greater level of success if you can have it nicely aerated especially if you're new to making sourdough starter but certainly if you want to use a jar you can using a jar like this does make it very easy to see exactly how much of a rise that you've gotten from your starter but today I'm gonna do it in this bowl and I'm just gonna go ahead and dump my all-purpose flour into the bowl and the next thing I'm gonna do is now measure out 1/2 a cup of water now this is what is known as 100% hydration that we're using the same amount of flour as we are using the same amount of water 1/2 a cup now if you did have a scale you could weigh it make sure that it was 100% exact however don't worry about it if you don't have a scale I never weigh my flour and water and I always have success with my starters so because what I find is if you just scoop the flour as I showed you into the 1/2 cup measure or a whole cup measure whatever device you're using to measure it's close enough and if we weighed the flour and the water they'd probably be pretty close so this is what I'm calling of 100% hydration or pretty close to 100% hydration then at this point all we want to do is take the little yeah I've got a little whisk here and mix the flour and the water together to make sure that the flour is fully incorporated with the water so all you're looking for is to just make like a slurry just a nice flour and water mixture like that and I'll take a close picture and overlay it so that you can see it up close and also I want to mention I'll have all the written directions for making this and all the details of what we're going to talk about in terms of diagnosing problems with sourdough starter and whatnot in this video today I'll have all of that over on my website Mary's nest comm and I'll also put a link in the description below to the exact post that'll have all of this that you can print out and keep for your records now the next thing that we're going to do is just take this lid put it on loosely you don't have to press it down or anything and set this aside in a warm place in your kitchen somewhere between 70 and 80 degrees Fahrenheit just put it in a warm place like that leave it undisturbed out of direct sunlight and just let it sit for two days now after letting your starter sit for two days you're going to remove the lid that you've just had on loosely and you're gonna remove a half worth or half of this and that's going to be your quote-unquote discarded sourdough starter now you will not have seen much activity at this point and that's fine you're on the right path now you're going to repeat the same step from the very beginning you're going to take your half cup of flour that you've spooned into your measuring cup and you're going to add a half a cup of water and then we're gonna take our whisk once again and give this a good mix once you get that nicely incorporated with another nice slurry mixture all you're gonna do is cover this loosely again with a lid you don't have to press it down just loosely and if you're using a bowl you can just use a little tea towel or plastic wrap whatever you have but just loose you want to let some air be able to circulate in there so now that's the third day and we're going to start from here feeding this starter every 12 hours so if by the second day is say for example it's 9:00 a.m. and we've taken out half and fed this with the half cup of flour and a half cup of water we're going to want to feed this again at 9:00 o'clock tonight now for this starter it's been 12 hours so now this needs to be fed so we're just going to want to remove about half of this and then we're going to repeat the same steps where we feed it again with the flour in the water and I just want to mention that down in the description below I'll put timestamps for throughout this video for throughout this video where I do each of these feedings and then each of the problems that we diagnose so we removed about half now we'll add in our half cup flour and our half cup of water and we'll mix this up again until we get a nice slurry now at this point you may not have seen any activity yet and that's completely normal so it's nothing to worry about often with an all-purpose flour starter it can take about seven days to get it to where you need it to be with a rye flour starter maybe about four days four to five days with whole-wheat starter maybe five or six days and with with the all-purpose flour starter it can take a good a good week or so so you might buy this third day in the evening when you go to feed it you might see a few bubbles you might not but it's no cause for concern so again you're just going to have your nice slurry mix and then you're going to want to put a lid on loosely again find a warm place in the kitchen somewhere between 70 and 80 or anywhere in your house for that matter between 70 and 80 degrees Fahrenheit and you'll just want to set that aside and then it will need to be fed again in 12 hours now 12 hours later you may find you are starting to see some bubbles and I'll take an up-close picture so that you can see that up close and now you're ready to do the same thing you're going to remove about half you're going to add a half a cup of flour and a half a cup of water and you're going to cover it loosely and let it sit for another 12 hours and then at that point you're gonna come back you're going to remove some you're going to feed it just as we've done so far and you're just going to keep watching it until you get a really nice frothy bubbly sourdough starter now you've reached a seven and you've been feeding your starter every 12 hours discarding some and replenishing some and you finally see some froth and some bubbles now I'm just going to move all of our various starters in various stages out of the and I want to show you what to expect from this day seven starter now I'm gonna overlay some pictures so you can see how by day seven this is all frothy and then I'll also put in a picture so that you can see from the side here the little bubbles that have started forming now a brand new starter is not going to be as Hardy as a seasoned starter one that you've had going for a long time like this one my older starter that I've had going a long time definitely looks different and I'll overlay a picture so you can also see this level of frothiness and the various bubbles on the side here however if you reach day 7 and it's frothy and it's got some nice bubbles you can definitely bake with this and I'll just scoop some so you can see see the level of frothiness that this starter has and that as I said is all ready to bake with now what if by day seven you're not seeing any bubbles you're not seeing any froth or maybe you're seeing just a few little bubbles don't worry if you're using all-purpose flour it can even take a little more than seven days up to ten days is not uncommon but what you'll want to do is maybe start feeding it every eight hours instead of every 12 hours and then hopefully by day 10 it should start to be frothy and have bubbles now if by day 10 it's not as frothy and bubbly as you thought don't worry if you do see some bubbles and some activity you can still try and go ahead and bake with it sometimes if your kitchen is exceptionally on the cool side as I had said in the beginning somewhere between 70 degrees Fahrenheit 80 degrees Fahrenheit it's kind of a nice range of temperatures for sourdough starter however if it's a little cooler say 68 degrees Fahrenheit in your kitchen your starter can still get going it may just not look as active and as healthy for a whole heck of a better word compared to a starter that might have been in a warmer temperature but that doesn't mean that you can't bake with it you can and if you're going to era one way or the other too cool or too warm you're better off erring on the side of too cool and the reason for that is even if your kitchen or the area where you have your sourdough starter resting is a little cooler yeast does better than bad bacteria when things are a little cooler yes yeast likes it warm and cozy and all of that but under conditions where it is a little cooler your yeast will be more likely to proliferate than your bad bacteria and that's helpful if it's taking a little longer for your starter to get going because if it is taking a little longer for your sourdough starter to get going there's more likelihood that you may develop mold and mold would appear as something fuzzy and it might have a pink or orange tint to it and then unfortunately you have to discard everything and start all over again but the chances of that happening if your sourdough starter is on the cooler side is less likely so it's not necessarily a bad thing if your starter does wind up taking more than seven days possibly because your environment is cooler the yeast may be proliferating slower but it's proliferating faster than the bad bacteria now let's talk about diagnosing some other problems as well say it's you're just not getting any activity out of your starter after seven eight nine ten days review what you did did you use a flower that was fresh and not expired the fresher your flower the better now certainly you can just buy a plain all-purpose flour from the grocery store that's not expired and use that now if you have a weap you know wheat berries and you grind them yourself and then you sift out the bran and the germ to make your own fresh all-purpose flour at home and you use that all the better and the same holds true for any grain if you have whole wheat or you know wheat berries and you grind them and you make whole wheat flour and you don't sift out any of the bran and germ and you want to make your starter with that that's great and it's very fresh and it should work very well the same for for rye or einkorn or Emmer or spelt any wheat form of wheat berry or other whole grain that you grind and then start using as your base for your sourdough starter is going to be very helpful but if you're just using flour that you buy in the bag from the grocery store that can work too just make sure that's not expired the next thing you want to think about is the water that you used did you use filtered water that did not have chlorine in it and that can either be you know bottled water that you purchased or if you have a system in your home that filters out the chlorine that's great or if you just use tap water did you let it sit overnight and let some of the chlorine evaporate that is what you want to do you want to use water that's as low in chlorine as possible and the reason is the chlorine can interfere with the ability of the yeast and the good bacteria to get this sourdough starter going so think about those two things where's your flour fresh at least if not freshly ground was it fresh from the grocery store and was your water as low in chlorine as possible now one thing I want to mention about the vessel that you use to start your sourdough starter in I'm using glass but you don't need to you can use metal metal the stainless steel bowls whatever you have on hand won't kill your starter and it won't impede its ability to get started now once you have a successful sourdough starter going let's talk about some of the things that can happen with it and diagnosing some of those problems now say you bake every day or relatively close to every day and you're gonna keep your sourdough starter on the counter and you're going to feed it regularly don't worry if you get a little off in terms of your feeding it does not need to be exactly every 12 hours you're not going to kill it sourdough starters are actually amazingly Hardy once they get going and older starters the longer you have it become even more hearty and something I'll tell you that I find rather amazing is that the gold miners up in Alaska would actually use their discarded sourdough starter to block the wind in their cabins they would put it between the logs or wherever they had drafts coming in in their cabins and then when they needed sourdough starter say the one they had died or they were out prospecting and weren't able to be feeding their starter or whatever the case may be they would actually chip some out rehydrate it and get it going so how are those starters are very hearty so don't worry as I said if you don't feed it exactly every 12 hours even if you miss accidentally miss a feeding you're not going to kill it no not only is it okay to not be exact about the 12 hour feedings what about the amounts of flour and water again don't worry if you feed it a little too much flour or a little too much water it seems a little too soupy or a little too thick you're not going to kill it it's gonna be fine so don't panic if when you even if you use the scoop method and you put your flour in and you put your water in and it seems a little more watery than it was before or this time maybe it seems a little thicker than it was before it's gonna be fine so don't worry about that either really there are only two enemies so to speak of a sourdough starter one is heat and what is just severe neglect you never want to keep your sourdough starter in the oven with the pilot eye pilot light on that has the chance of killing it and if not killing it it has the chance of allowing mold to develop now once a sourdough starters are well established there's less chance of mold however as the sourdough starter gets in a more warm environment you don't want to chance the development of bacteria and the killing of the good yeast that's made your beautiful starter so you want to make sure that you never let your starter get into an environment where it's over a hundred and forty degrees Fahrenheit now that said even temperatures under that that are still quite warm can hurt your starter as I said even in in your oven with the pilot light on or the electric light on maybe it's 110 120 you're starting to get into a territory that it's going to make it difficult for your starter to proliferate for the yeast to proliferate and opens the door for bad bacteria to take over so that is the first enemy just letting it get too hot you never want it to be exposed to 140 degrees Fahrenheit or warmer and even a little bit under that I would be very careful with it the next problem is really neglecting your sourdough starter it's one thing to overfeed it undefeated skip a feeding but if you leave this at room temperature and you've not taken the opportunity to dehydrate it for storage you're just simply leaving it like this with the flour and water mixed in it and left on the counter for days and days and and you're probably going to kill it you've got to feed it it's going to be hungry so if you decide that you're in a situation where maybe you're going to go on vacation or you're not going to be baking bread then you want to move on to the step where you refrigerate your starter or dehydrated because if you just leave it on the counter like this that's going to be subject to neglect and then it's going to die bacteria may take over and so on and so forth so don't neglect your sourdough starter you don't need to be perfect with it it is surprisingly Hardy but you just can't neglect it on and on and on now if you decide you're not ready to bake bread and you do want to stop you do want to store your sourdough starter you can dehydrate it and it's very easy to do I have a video on that and I'll put a link to it in the I cards but basically you just spread some out on parchment paper you don't even really need a dehydrator if you spread it thin enough it'll dehydrate at room temperature and then you just break it up in a lot of little bits of pieces and then you can put it in a canning jar maybe get all the oxygen out and store it in your pantry and then like the gold miners when you're ready to make bread just break it up add water start feeding it and reconstituted and again take a couple of days you know to get going again but it should be fine the next way that you can store it is right in your refrigerator and what you want to do is you'll put it in the refrigerator and you should probably take it out once a week and feed it now if you go a little longer or a little shorter it's not the end of the world but if you can get into the habit of feeding it once a week that'll be great now if after one week or even if you go a little longer than one week you may find that a liquid starts developing on top and that liquid is called hooch and you may find that it has quite a strong aroma possibly very penny vinegary or sour type smell of versus the sort of yeasty almost beer like smell that you would become used to with your sourdough starter and that hoot is not a problem you can either drain it off or if you like a very sour sourdough starter that makes a very sour sourdough bread you can just mix the hooch right in now it may be gray it may be brown it may be black it can be an assortment of colors but it's not harmful and as I said it's not killed your sourdough starter your sourdough starter is still alive you just need to drain that off or mix it in and feed your sourdough starter to give it the nutrition that it needs and then once you're ready to bake with your sourdough starter and you remove it from your refrigerator if it's been a week or a bit longer you'll just want to start feeding it again and give it a day or two to perk up and be ready to bake with often when you take it out of the refrigerator and feed it it may not be ready for baking the next day so if you can try to plan a day or two to feed it and get it going again but if your starters only been in the fridge for maybe three or four days you may be able to feed it the night before and once you take it out of the refrigerator feed it leave it on your counter you probably will be able to bake with it the next day but usually if it's been in the fridge a week or longer it does take a little more time to reactivate it now next what if when you go to smell your sourdough starter the aroma is not one of what you typically associate with a yeasty type smell what if it smells very sour or as some people have even described like nail polish remover like acetone no don't worry nothing's gone wrong what has happened is the bacteria acids the good bacteria the good bacteria acids have become stronger than the yeasts what's happened is that the bacteria that produces acetic acid which is bacteria that also creates vinegar has taken over and becomes stronger than the yeast and so you're going to get that very strong acetic acid aroma which is an acetone aroma your sourdough starter will still work and it'll still make a beautiful loaf of bread it's just that the taste of your sourdough bread is going to be more sour now some people don't want a very sourdough bread they want a more mild sourdough bread so how do you correct that problem if your starter has now taken over or the the good bacteria that creates the acetic acid is taken over and is becoming stronger than the yeast what do you do the first thing that you can do is start feeding your starter more frequently maybe move up to eight hours instead of instead of every 12 hours and the reason is that when you feed the starter more frequently you're going to dilute in essence the bacterial acids that are creating that acetic acid aroma and flavor and you're going to give the yeast a little boost because the yeast with the frequent feedings will fare better and proliferate more than the bacterial acids now that said when you do these more frequent feedings if you really want to give it a little help and give the yeast a little help refrigerate it and I know this sounds funny because it kind of goes against the rule of having your starter at that nice 70 to 80 degree fahrenheit temperature however if you feed it and you feed it and you keep feeding it every eight hours and then you put it in the refrigerator after each feeding you actually help give the yeast a boost yes the yeast loves the warm temperatures however in cold temperatures yeast four performs better or survives better than the bacteria whether it's good bacteria or bad bacteria so by refrigerating it you give the yeast a little jumpstart over the bacteria because it will be able to eat and proliferate a little faster even though yes it's in the refrigerator and everything does slow down it will proliferate a little quicker than the bacteria and so that will help your starter get back to having that nice yeasty aroma that we associate with sourdough starters now the next tip I want to share with you in the event that your starter has taken on that nail polish remover that acetone smell is when you go to feed your starter stir it as little as possible and then put your lid right on and the reason is the acetic acid bacteria likes oxygen it allows to be oxygenated and that's why when we talk about making ethyl cider vinegar which if that's something you're interested it I'll put a link in the iCard above that we stir it every day and the reason is because that type of bacteria loves to be oxygenated so if you just feed it stir it only as nests as much as necessary cover it up and let it be it'll be less likely to help give that acetic acid bacteria the oxygenation that it needs so hopefully this guide I'll get you started on creating a successful sourdough starter so that you can now make sourdough bread and if you'd like to learn more about traditional nutrient-dense cooking be sure to subscribe to my channel and then click on this video over here where I show you how to use this starter to make a sourdough bread see over there in my Texas Hill Country kitchen love and God bless

Channel: Mary's Nest

Views: 270,128

Rating: 4.9267416 out of 5

Keywords: The Complete Sourdough Starter Guide, The Ultimate Sourdough Starter Guide, sourdough, sourdough starter, sourdough guide, sourdough starter guide, how to make a sourdough starter, sourdough bread, how to make sourdough, the best sourdough, easy sourdough starter, sourdough at home, homemade sourdough, how to create a sourdough starter, sourdough recipe, what is a sourdough starter, how to maintain a sourdough starter, sourdough starter maintenance, Marysnest, Marys nest

Id: NGF2WGKX5dU

Length: 30min 39sec (1839 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 28 2019