Every bread maker has their technique for making sourdough. When I started baking I looked up a dozen different recipes for a starter. Each one was unique, and the bakers all had reasons for doing things they way they did. Since then I have made half a dozen different starters, in a wide variety of locations, and environments. Some of these include; India, Nepal, Raleigh NC, Richmond VA, and Louisiana.
This picture is of the starter I made in Raleigh, NC. This was the most difficult starter I have made, and I think it may have been influenced by some wine yeast I had present in the kitchen. I named this one Willy Nelson, because he likes to get baked.
Every starter I have made was different in flavor and behavior. Some took only 3-4 days to mature, and others took over 3 weeks (Willy).
While each starter was different, the method I used to create them was the same. You will find that my method for making a starter is much simpler than others. If I'm honest, it's probably because I am a lazy baker. I usually only have small windows of time I can commit to baking each day, so my recipes have to be adapted to fit my lifestyle. Sourdough was no exception; this recipe will not require hours of your life, and will still yield wonderful bread.
Sourdough Starter
If you are new to sourdough and starters here are some terms used in the sourdough world that might be new to you:
Starter: This is a wild culture of yeast and good bacteria that leaven your bread
Yeast: This is the primary organism that leavens your bread by eating flour and producing CO2 and alcohol.
Lactic acid bacteria: This is another organism that lives happily with your yeast and produces lactic acid that makes your bread sour and breaks down protein/gluten. This makes sourdough bread easier to digest than normal bread.
Feeding: This refers to your regular process of adding fresh flour and water to your starter for your yeast and bacteria to consume. This keeps your starter alive, and allows you to always have a supply of starter for baking.
Discard: This is the removal of excess starter so that you do not continually accumulate starter from feeding. Discard is best used in baking bread to eliminate waste.
Mature: This is when a starter is ready to leaven bread. Once mature, a starter can stay alive for hundreds of years as long as you keep feeding it.
Understanding the science of yeast and lactic acid bacteria will greatly improve your abilities as a baker, but keep in mind that this kind of bread has been around for thousands of years... people where making sourdough long before the science existed to explain it. So making good bread usually comes down to finding a groove that works for you, and sticking to it.
Here is my groove:
Ingredients:
Flour (same flour I want to bake bread with)
Water
Directions:
(Day 1) Start by finding a medium sized plastic container with a lid, or glass mason jar.
Add about 1/4 cup flour to the jar, then add a little less than 1/4 cup water to the jar.
Mix it together and check the thickness. It should be sticky and able to be scooped with a fork. If it's too thick add a little water. If it's too thin, add some flour.
Loosely place the lid on top of the container so that air can escape, and set it somewhere at room temp for 1 day.
(Day 2) Next day add another 1/4 cup flour and a little less than 1/4 cup water. Mix, check thickness, and set aside for another day.
(Day 3) This time discard half of the mixture, and repeat steps 2-4. You want to continue doing this daily until the starter is mature. This daily process is called feeding.
The best way to use your discard is to bake with it, but until your starter is mature, your discard isn't really useful. This waste is unpleasant, so that is why I do very small amounts of flour when getting my starter going, and only feed once a day. Still there are some options for using your discard even before the starter is mature, one is to add it into some pancake batter.
There is no rule to how long this will take for your starter to mature. Sometimes it can happen as quick as 4 days, but usually takes a week, maybe two.
A mature starter will double in size in just a couple hours, and the smell will be sweet.
In the first few days of making a starter you will begin to notice an extra sour smell in your mixture. This smell is created by different kinds of yeast competing to dominate the starter. You will get some bubbles durring this time, but it is not ready to leaven bread. You keep feeding the starter until one yeast takes over. From all of those competing yeasts, one will eventually dominate the rest and become your "pet". When this happens you will notice your starter rising and making bubbles very quickly, and the smell will change to become sweeter and much more pleasant.
Name your new pet. You have to... its the rule.
Once I have a mature starter, I like to keep it in the fridge. Yeast do better in the cold than lactic acid bacteria, so this usually makes for a less sour bread. But it is convenient and makes for much less effort if you are not baking daily.
Regular feeding and use of a mature starter:
Once I have a mature starter and can bake bread with it, this is my process for baking and feeding my starter. First, I get the starter straight from the fridge; I do not let it warm up first... too much effort and fore-thought. Nor do I make a leaven the night before. I just plop some cold starter from the jar into my warm (not hot) water, and gently mix it. Then while the yeast is "waking up" for about 5 minutes in the warm water, I feed my starter. So my "discard" for feeding was used for bread, this eliminates waste. I set my, now fed, starter out at room temp for about 8 hours, or until it has doubled and started to fall, then place it back into the fridge for next week's bread. Don't put it straight into the fridge after feeding. The cold environment will slow down the growth of the yeast and bacteria, so if it doesn't have time to grow and multiply before going into the fridge, you likely won't be able to use it for bread next time you bake. I'll cover the process I use for making sourdough bread in another recipe.
Once the starter is back in the fridge, it can stay alive in there for a couple of weeks. I have gone as long as two months in-between baking and still had a functioning starter. If it's only been 1-2 weeks since your last time feeding the starter, you can bake with it straight from the fridge. However, if you do wait longer, you may have to do an additional feeding and keep your starter at room temperature for an extra day to get it back to strength.