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Did you know that you can make your own sourdough starter at home? The best part is that creating a thriving and healthy sourdough starter from scratch takes little effort.With this, you can happily bake the best sourdough breads and pastries within one week!
What is a sourdough starter?
A sourdough starter is a leavening agent that helps to bake fluffy bread and pastries containing flour. Sourdough is a traditional baking method that is thousands of years old. It’s affordable and easy to maintain. Since sourdough is not exceptionally famous, you may already have heard of commercial yeast, which has been typically used for baking recently and works similarly to sourdough starter.
Sourdough contains lactic acid bacteria and wild yeast—a natural and friendly fungus that lives everywhere in your home and the flour. In contrast, commercial yeast only contains yeast, as the name suggests, and is produced in factories to guarantee uniform results.
How does sourdough work?
Both work through a fermentation process. The dough is left at room temperature to rest so that the fungi and bacteria can ferment the flour. Commercial yeast creates alcohol and carbon dioxide gas out of the sugar (flour) during fermentation, making the dough fluffy and airy. Sourdough works similarly. The fungi and bacteria living symbiotically inside the glass jar create alcohol, carbon dioxide gas, and lactic acid during fermentation.
The main difference between both leavening agents is that baking with sourdough requires much longer fermentation than baking with commercial yeast. This is because the sourdough works slower than the commercial yeast. Still, concurrently, this guarantees that the flour’s nutrients are better available and the bread has a higher digestibility.
This is especially great news for anyone sensitive to gluten. Gluten is the protein typically found in almost all grains, such as wheat, spelt, emmer, einkorn, rye, or barley. It is also responsible for bread that is incredibly fluffy and airy. Gluten makes the dough elastic, allowing the air to form lovely bubbles.
Why should you bake with a sourdough starter?
You follow a thousand-year-old tradition by baking sourdough breads and pastries. Baking with sourdough is the traditional way of baking bread. And there are a few positive aspects of baking with sourdough.
If you’re sensitive to gluten or have trouble digesting whole grains or grains in general, baking with sourdough will massively benefit you. During the more extended fermentation period, the microorganisms have enough time to help break down the gluten and make it more digestible for humans. The key note here is that the longer you let any dough ferment before you bake it, the better the digestibility and the less you probably will react if you’re sensitive to gluten (not celiac!)
The lactic acid bacteria and wild yeast you cultivate in your glass jar are powerful and hungry. When you add sourdough starter to your bread dough, the microorganisms feed on the carbohydrates and create an airy and bubbly bread, just as we all love it!
Also, the sourdough starter adds a unique taste and smell to the dough, making the most delicious sourdough bread and pastries.
What do you need to consider before starting your sourdough starter?
It would be best if you took care of your sourdough starter.
A sourdough starter is a living organism; like anything else, you must be willing to take good care of it if you want to enjoy it for longer than one week. Honestly, it’s too much work to create your sourdough starter in the first place to mindlessly throw it away after you’ve used it for once.
Before you start your sourdough starter, consider whether you’re willing to care for a mixture of millions of bacteria and yeast. Some people have had their starter for years and decades!
Taking good care of your sourdough starter is straightforward and doesn’t require much time. However, it requires some form of maintenance. Besides commercial yeast, you cannot buy it in the store and expect it to live forever. A sourdough starter is sensitive and requires some learning and understanding from you.
But if you’re willing to understand your sourdough starter truly, you will be rewarded with bread and pastries that are easily digestible, great in texture and smell, and incredibly delicious!
Baking with a sourdough starter takes patience and time.
Baking with a sourdough starter differs immensely from using commercial yeast. It starts with the acquisition. Commercial yeast can easily be purchased at any grocery store, but you usually have to make the sourdough starter from scratch. This alone will take up to one week, so it’s way more time-consuming than baking with commercial yeast.
Also, the baking process itself is different. Using commercial yeast, you typically let your dough rest and ferment for one to two hours before baking the goods. You cannot expect to work with a sourdough starter as your leavening agent within this time frame. After a fermentation time of only two hours, your dough won’t be activated much. The sourdough takes up to 16 hours to do its job correctly.
Therefore, with a sourdough starter, you’ll learn the art of patience. But I can promise you will be highly rewarded for it!
You’ll end up with sourdough discard.
The most time and energy-consuming aspect of cultivating your sourdough starter is the discard you’ll end up with. You must get creative about what to do with it and how to utilise it if you don’t want to throw it away.
What is sourdough discard?
You’ll end up with sourdough you won’t feed for every feeding of your sourdough starter. This is called sourdough discard. For me, this was the most confusing part of getting started with sourdough baking.
When feeding your sourdough starter, mix one gram of fresh flour and water with every gram of sourdough. If you have 100g of active sourdough in your glass jar, you’ll need at least 100g of flour and 100g of water to feed it.
This will triple the size of your sourdough starter from 100g to 300g. For the next feeding, this 300g of sourdough starter should be fed again with equal amounts of flour and water, 300g each, leaving you with 900g of active sourdough.
You will have to split your sourdough starter.
It would be best to split the sourdough starter to keep things manageable. Otherwise, you will have to feed more and more of the sourdough starter to keep it healthy and alive.
Therefore, before you feed the sourdough starter, discard the amount you don’t want to cultivate for longer. You will always only feed the starter you need for your baking efforts.
For 1kg of bread dough, this will be about 200g of sourdough starter, plus about 100g of starter, which will remain in the glass jar for future maintenance.
Discarding your sourdough starter will leave you with options. You could throw the discard away, but this is a waste of good product. The other, more environmentally friendly and sustainable option would be to use the discard in a recipe and eat it.
Tips before you start with your sourdough starter
- Use a glass jarthat is big enough that your sourdough starter can rise at least double in size like this one*– this will guarantee that you don’t have a lot of mess in your kitchen since the starter won’t come out of the jar. With a glass jar, handling your sourdough starter is much easier since you can easily clean the glass. It’s crucial that the glass jar is NOT airtight – remove any plastic bands from the lid to prevent your sourdough starter from suffocating!
- Use high-quality organic whole-grain flourto grow and feed your sourdough starter. The better the quality of your flour – the base of your sourdough starter – the happier your sourdough starter will be in the long term. Tip: In my experience, starting a sourdough starter works best with whole grain flour like whole spelt or whole wheat.
- Use high-quality waterfor your sourdough starter—this tip is major! I killed my first starter using regular tap water instead of high-quality bottled water. Tap water could be enriched with fluoride and chlorine, and this kills the good bacteria and fungi living in the sourdough starter.
- Have a warm placefor your sourdough starter to grow and thrive so that you can make the best sourdough bread and pastries!
How to start your sourdough starter
Let’s start with the exciting part –create your sourdough starter!
This is the moment where, on the internet, you’ll find many different guides for creating your sourdough starter. I have had my sourdough starter for over half a year, but it’s not the first I made.
The most typical guide for creating a sourdough starter starts with 50g of flour and 50g of water. However, this method results in discard from the very beginning. I did it exactly like this with the first sourdough starter I created and threw away the discard for several days.
If you decide to use this or a similar method, I highly recommend throwing away your discard in the first week since your sourdough starter has yet to be established. Also, it’s best to give yourself enough time, especially in the beginning, to learn the difference between a safe-to-use discard and a discard (as it happens in the first few days) you better throw away instead of using it in your recipes.
An even better and more effective way of creating your sourdough starter exists.
With this method, you won’t have any discard in the first few days, making it much easier to start your sourdough starter.
Start your first sourdough starter!
Day 1
Today is Day One of creating your sourdough starter! Your glass jar – In the first few days, I always use a smaller glass jar for better handling, like this one* – and high-quality organic whole-grain flour are prepared and ready for usage on Day One.
I recommend using whole-grain flour from the beginning since the bacteria and fungi work better with it. You’ll want to support your starter’s growth as best as possible, especially in the beginning. Later, you can switch to all-purpose flour if you like.
Side note: I always use whole spelt flour for my starter, never all-purpose flour, because consuming enough fibre is essential for me to live with a healthy body, especially for balanced gut health. Also, the starter tends to thrive more with whole-grain flour.
Tip: Don’t overwhelm your sourdough starter by switching between different types of flour. Before you start your sourdough starter, decide what flour you use—I recommend whole spelt flour—and then stick with it for at least the next few weeks.
In the morning or evening—this is up to your preference—add 1 tablespoon (ca. 15g) of whole grain flour and 1 tablespoon of high-quality water to your glass jar. Mix until the dough is even, and leave the jar at room temperature (around 20-25°C is perfect) without direct sunlight. That’s it! That’s the job for the day.
Tip: I always leave my sourdough starter next to the stove, the warmest place in the room. The warmer it is, the more efficiently the bacteria and fungi work in the glass jar. But be aware that if the temperature is too high, your sourdough starter will be too active and over-ferment quickly.
You will come back tomorrow at the same time for the first feeding.
Tip: It’s essential to feed your sourdough starter at the same time every day in the beginning since you still have to learn to interpret its signs of hunger and discomfort. Sticking to a schedule will prevent your sourdough starter from dying.
Day 2
On Day Two, you should already be able to see some activity. It could be that your sourdough’s texture changed overnight – it developed liquids, bubbles appeared, or the smell changed.
Today is the first time you’ll feed your sourdough starter.
Tip: One major tip when it comes to feeding your sourdough starter is this: to keep your sourdough starter healthy and happy, you’ll want to feed the same amount of flour to the existing sourdough starter, plus add water on top.
This was the most confusing part of working with sourdough for me initially. But think of the flour and water mixture, aka your active sourdough starter, as a living organism—what it is! Every little gram of this thriving organism is hungry and wants to be fed. To satisfy this hunger, you want to feed something—you wouldn’t drink water if you were hungry.
The same goes for your sourdough starter. First, it’s hungry and wants to be fed with flour. The water is also essential, but in this context, you’ll add it only to ensure the perfect texture.
Today, on Day Two, you’ll feed your sourdough starter in double amounts – 2 tablespoons of flour and 2 tablespoons of water.
Mix this mixture of water and flour with the existing sourdough starter in the glass jar until it’s a smooth dough. Then, leave the jar on the side until the next day.
Day 3
On Day Three, you follow the same procedure as on Day Two. Feed the sourdough starter 6 tablespoons of flour and 6 tablespoons of water. Mix everything to a smooth dough and let the starter rest for the day.
Day 4
On Day Four, you should be able to come back to a living and thriving sourdough starter. With bubbles on the surface and within the dough, a change of texture – the dough can be more liquid and evenly – and smell – a typical sourdough smell is lightly sweet and acidic like vinegar or buttermilk -or a layer of liquid on top of the dough.
Side note: Your sourdough starter will still smell like flour from days one to three. This means it has an almost invisible and very light sweet smell. On day three, this should change. You will recognise that your sourdough starter starts to smell more intense. The smell could be anything from sweeter to slightly like vinegar.
Tip: If your sourdough starter starts to smell like nail polish remover, aka acetone, the microorganisms are beginning to digest themselves and die due to a lack of food. If you can still sniff the acetone without getting an ick, you can try to save your sourdough starter. But throwing it away is better if the smell is powerful and unpleasant. Therefore, it’s essential to stick to a feeding schedule. Your sourdough starter loves routines!
On Day Four, you’ll change the schedule.
You should already have around 200g of active sourdough starter in your glass jar by now. This is too much to feed for a sourdough starter we won’t use just yet.
Therefore, today is the first day you must grab a kitchen scale like this one*, as you’ll discard your sourdough starter for the first time!
I always grab a small bowl to measure 100g of active sourdough starter. We’ll keep this part for further maintenance, and the rest of the glass jar’s contents can be thrown away.
Tip: I recommend not using the discard since the starter is very young and probably doesn’t smell like a healthy sourdough starter. Your colony of friendly fungus and bacteria has yet to be established, and some harmful bacteria could still be present inside the glass jar.
Add 100g of active sourdough starter to the 100g of whole grain flour and 100g of water. Mix everything and put it back into the cleaned glass jar. Leave it again at room temperature to ferment.
Side note: You don’t have to clean the glass jar every time you feed the sourdough, but it’s essential, especially in the beginning, to prevent harmful bacteria and fungi from taking over the contents.
On Day Four, you’ll add a second feeding to your schedule. After around 10 to 12 hours, return to the sourdough starter in the morning or evening, opposite your usual feeding schedule.
From now on, you’ll feed once in the morning and once in the evening. Follow the same procedure as for the first feeding on Day Four. Keep 100g of sourdough starter and discard the rest. Add 100g of flour and 100g of water. Mix everything until you have a smooth and even dough. Leave the mixture at room temperature to ferment.
Day 5
Day Five is the first day you usually can keep the sourdough discard. But you have to be observant. Check the smell of your sourdough starter thoroughly.
Tip: A healthy, well-fed sourdough starter smells rich but pleasant. It’s slightly sweet and slightly sour, like buttermilk. It can also very lightly smell like apple cider vinegar. But usually, your sourdough starter has a pleasant, not intense, smell.
Today, you’ll continue with the feeding schedule of two daily feedings. I baked the first bread with my new sourdough starter when it was six days old. But it’s also natural if your sourdough starter needs more time, like seven to twelve days, to be ready for use as your leavening agent. Be patient and stick to the feeding schedule, and you’ll get the rewards!
It’s crucial that your sourdough starter double in size after one feeding.
Feeding it in the morning with the regular feeding schedule of 100g sourdough + 100g flour + 100g water should become active enough to double in size after six to eight hours. This is when you know your sourdough starter is ready to bake.
Tip: To check the sourdough’s development, I always use an elastic band around the glass jar to mark where I left it right after feeding. This way, you can quickly see how much your sourdough starter rises.
If your sourdough starter doubles in size and becomes bubbly and active, this is the perfect time to bake your first sourdough bread!
Instruction Overview
- Day 1—Add 1 tbsp flour and 1 tbsp water to a glass jar.
- Day 2—Add 2 tbsp flour and 2 tbsp water to the flour-water mixture in the glass jar.
- Day 3—Add 6 tbsp flour and 6 tbsp water to the mixture.
- Day 4—Discard the active sourdough starter from the glass jar and keep 100g of it. Add 100g of flour and 100g of water to the mixture. After around 10 hours, add a second feeding.
- Day 5—Follow the feeding schedule until your sourdough starter doubles in size and becomes bubbly and active. This can take up to two to eight days of regular feeding from Day Four.
How to store your sourdough starter?
By now, you should have cultivated a healthy and thriving sourdough starter to bake glorious breads and pastries. Congratulations! You did it!
Now is the time to think about the long-term maintenance of your sourdough starter. You have several options here:
First option:
Leave the sourdough starter on the counter at room temperature and feed it daily. This is great if you use it daily or every second day. Therefore, you want to keep it very active and thriving.
You can only achieve this by leaving it at room temperature and feeding it daily, which would be too time-consuming for me. Therefore, I always follow the second option.
Second option:
After you use the sourdough starter for your recipe, you’ll feed it again and leave it on the counter at room temperature for only one hour. Afterwards, you can put the glass jar with the sourdough starter in your fridge.
The colder temperature does not kill your sourdough starter, so don’t worry. The only thing it provides is much slower activity. In the fridge, your sourdough starter will become almost inactive, which is especially helpful since one feeding will be sufficient for a much extended period. This way, you don’t have to feed your colony of microorganisms as regularly, which will help you be much more flexible with your baking projects.
Third option:
You can dehydrate your sourdough starter. This is perfect for long-term storage, like months or even years. I have yet to try this since I regularly use my sourdough starter and have not yet felt the necessity to try this method out.
But if this sounds interesting to you, and you want to try it out, I link a well-written and very detailed article here.
How can you work with your sourdough starter?
For inspiration, this is my schedule:
Every Friday evening, I take my sourdough starter out of the fridge. It has become almost utterly inactive throughout the week, and this is when I feed it for the first time after one week of ignoring it.
I discard what I don’t need into an airtight container for later usage and feed the sourdough starter. Afterwards, I leave it on the counter at room temperature to become active again and ferment the flour.
Following the same procedure, I feed it again on Saturday morning, around 8 am. At this time, I won’t have any discards since I discarded the starter yesterday.
Therefore, I feed it with flour and water as usual and let it rise on the counter at room temperature. Due to the second feeding, the sourdough starter doubles in size and becomes active and bubbly after approximately six to eight hours. This is between 2 pm and 4 pm.
This is when I start the baking process. Usually, I make two doughs, each with 1kg of flour. Therefore, I always need around 400g of active sourdough starter plus a little over 100g to maintain it.
After I use the sourdough starter for my recipes, I feed it one last time – Saturday evening—the remaining 100g of active starter. Next, I leave the glass jar with the fed starter on the kitchen counter for only one hour. This helps the starter remain more active throughout the week, leaving me with a more manageable starter the following Friday.
Starting your sourdough starter can be done with the right guide and schedule. Hopefully, this blog post helped you understand your sourdough starter and encouraged you to try baking with sourdough yourself!
As you can see, creating and maintaining a sourdough starter is no secret and can be straightforward with the proper procedure and tools.
Like always, I highly encourage you to get active today! If you want to add baking with sourdough to your list of things you’ve learned, today is the perfect day to create your sourdough starter!
Over time, you will learn to understand the philosophy of sourdough and soon understand why so many people love to bake with it. Sourdough baking is a wholesome experience, and I hope you will soon experience it, too.
Until next time,
Keep evolving into your most glorious self!
