sourdough

To make sourdough bread, or sourdough anything, what you need is a sourdough starter. They can be big or small, fed with lots of different flours, and each one has a unique combination of yeasts that grow inside it. Some bakeries have heritage starters that have been around for over a century! If you want to get in on the sourdough boom, here’s an easy way of doing it. Note: I started playing with sourdough about 6 months ago. I don’t know everything, but I am enthusiastic and have learned a lot, including some myths that I will talk about at the end of the article. I am sure that in a few years I will look back, embarrassed at my lack of knowledge, but what I will tell you today will be enough to get you started. You will need:

Glass jar – sourdough likes glass, not plastic. A wide neck is good, and the lid shouldn’t ever be airtight
Scales – to weight out your ingredients
Spoon/spatula
Flour – for best success, get some vaguely fancy rye flour. This is probably your most expensive outlay, and even the priciest flour is maybe £3. Remember, this will probably dictate a lot of the flavour of the starter
Water
Patience – making this takes at least 5 days, and up to 2 weeks before your starter is fully happy!

First things first, let’s make the starter. This involves mixing together flour and water every day for 5 days, and leaving the mixture at room temperature for the rest of the time.

Day 1: 100g flour + 100g water.
Day 2: 50g flour + 50g water.
Day 3: 50g flour + 50g water. You might see bubbles by now!
Day 4: 50g flour + 50g water. You should be seeing some bubbles
Day 5: 50g flour + 50g water. You should have a starter now! A bit bubbly and smelling slightly sour. Time to name your new pet.

Even though your starter is alive and bubbling by day 5, I would say that it will take a couple weeks for it to properly find its feet. Different yeast strains are competing, and a few will win out to populate most of the starter but this takes a little time. After day 5, you can put your starter in the fridge, but when I made mine I kept him out and fed him every few days for maybe two weeks. The first loaf I made about a week in didn’t rise so much, but subsequent ones did once Ryeley was more mature.

At some point your starter is going to get quite large given all the flour we keep feeding it unless we do something to make it smaller! The main way of making sure it doesn’t overflow the jar is by using it to bake with, but you can also discard starter and store it for other things. Literally just scoop some starter out before you feed it next so it’s a reasonable size. You can also throw this discard away, but that feels wasteful and there are so many things you can make from it! I’ve made delicious pancakes, crumpets and cakes with discard.

This is where I keep my discard, ready for pancakes

I prefer to keep a smaller starter than the one this guide makes – probably less than 200g total. I don’t need to feed it as much flour, and it’s much more active when I do feed it (less starter being fed new flour means more food for each yeast!). It’s important to use a little more flour to make the starter so that there’s enough yeast to begin with, but after it’s up and running do consider making it just big enough.

Some sourdough myths:

Feed your starter EVERY day, and the EXACT same time, or your starter will be TERRIBLE

A lot of guides go on about how you MUST feed your starter daily, and at exactly the same time each day, but I’m here to tell you that you don’t have to! Firstly, keeping a starter in the fridge means that it is less active and needs to be fed less often anyway, but also these guides say this because they are baking bread extremely frequently and need their starters to be reliable. True, if you are baking many loaves per day or week, feeding daily or even more regularly makes sense. Feeding on a schedule means that the yeast follow a good pattern of activity, which lends itself to uniform outcomes on bakes. For me, there is no way I could eat that amount of bread or afford that much flour to feed and discard so much. I am happy keeping my starter in the fridge, feeding when it looks like it needs it, using a recipe that has a levain (more on this later – it means I can be sure the yeast is active enough), and accepting that I might have more variation in my loaves than a professional bakery.

Feed your starter regularly or it will DIEEEEEE

This is my starter after being abandoned for a week. All I did was discard some and give it a good feed. Happy as anything

A starter can take a surprising amount of neglect. I am regularly away for 2 weeks or more at a time, and I’ve never had a problem with my starter dying. I feed him just before I leave, and when I get back sometimes I give him a little bit more TLC to get him back to full strength – a day or two of room temp and feeding daily is more than enough.

You have to be really precise. About EVERYTHING

Nope! Whether that applies to feeding your starter or making your bread, it’s ok if you’re a little out. Sure, it changes how the starter or dough handles a bit, but it’s not a disaster. In fact, doing this is one of the best ways of learning. Accidentally add too much flour. See what happens. Maybe your starter is too stiff, or the dough hard to knead. Now you know for next time, and you’ll have a better idea of what it should be like. The bread you make will still be edible either way!

If you now have a starter and would like to bake some bread, I would recommend halving this recipe be Joshua Weissman ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eod5cUxAHRM&t=587s ) and giving it a go. Tweak it, use different flours, different proving times, see what happens, learn along the way and let me know how you get on!

My Instagram Discover page, featuring chocolate, dessert, coffee, and lots of sourdough baking!

What comes into mind when you think of the word ‘sourdough’? Probably fancy brunches, smashed avocado, £6 for a loaf of bread. Sourdough bread is increasingly popular at the moment, fuelled by a love of brunch, a move towards what I would call ‘artisanry’ and a desire for ‘clean’ or ‘healthy’ food (I would like to write more in detail about this trend and actually research it at some point, but right now I want to show you pictures of bread I have baked!). Places like Gail’s Bakery and Brick House have popularised this style of bread, as have beautiful bread Instagrams. It’s not unusual to see piles of loaves artistically stacked in cafes, bakeries and markets alike.

I find this posh, artisanal stereotype of sourdough, or any bread for that matter, amusing because bread is one of the simplest things to make. At the most base level, it takes 4 ingredients: flour, water, salt, raising agent. In normal bread, the raising agent is yeast, and in sourdough bread this is your ‘starter’. I grew up eating home-cooked bread from a bread machine, and rarely eating ‘plastic’ bread from supermarkets. We only ever baked yeasted breads, so my first experience with sourdough bread must have been at one of those fancy cafes I was talking about. I love the crustiness, the crumbs that flake off it, the irregular innards and the slight tang that you get from a slice of sourdough. I knew it was easy to bake your own bread, but it was only this year that I decided to give it a go with sourdough.

This is Ryeley. He is my rye starter. Geddit?

The process of creating a sourdough starter is the first step to having sourdough bread. I think of my starter(s) (I now have two. Their names are Rye-ley and Georgina. Yes, this is extra.) as very low maintenance pets who live in my fridge. They are simply flour and water mixed together in a 1:1 ratio populated by the yeasts that live in the flour you use. The yeasts eat the flour over time, multiply, and emit gases as they consume the flour, so you have to feed them semi-frequently so they have something to eat. I’ll go into a guide on how to make your starter in a different post. You take a portion of the starter you have each time you bake and use that in the bread mixture.

Looked good from the top!
The first bite from my first sourdough loaf…tasted amazing
Although it looked pretty, I underbaked a little, and it didn’t rise very much

Sourdough bread is quite involved, and it takes a bit of time to get it right. Often it takes two or three days from starting the recipe to having a finished loaf, and all sorts of factors can influence the outcome of the bread. How happy your starter is, what flour you use, how much water you add, how long and how warm you prove the dough for, how you shape and score the bread, and so many more variables need to be taken into account. For a lover of baking like me this is so much fun. Over time I am getting to know my starters, and learning what influences what in the bread. The first few loaves weren’t disasters, but I had so much I wanted to change and improve on every time I baked. Now I know that Ryeley is a pretty happy starter and munches away at flour nicely even when neglected, whereas Georgina is a bit of a fussy child and gets grumpy without her regular feed. I know that I need to flour teatowels GENEROUSLY otherwise stickages occur. I know a little more about how to tell when a dough has developed enough gluten and whether it has proved enough. And oh boy I am only just getting started in the art of scoring the loaves to make pretty designs on top. At this point I have tried out three or four recipes, as well as altering things myself to try and get it right. And since I’ve started playing with sourdough it’s gone from winter to summer, which affects everything all over again!

Four of my most recent loaves! Which design is your favourite?
Crumb shot! Aiming for irregular, but not so much that all your innards fall out when you use it for a sandwich

I haven’t bought bread since February, and I am hoping to keep this up. I think that as well as being tastier than store bought bread, I am saving money. The only cost of these loaves is the flour I buy to bake with. Each loaf is maybe 250g flour, which works out as 50p per loaf if I were to use the fanciest flour possible (yes I went to Waitrose and bought a bag of flour that cost £3), and much less with other flours.

Bread isn’t the only thing that uses sourdough starter. Anything that uses yeast you can theoretically replace the yeast with starter, adjusting recipes for moisture and rising time. So far I have also tried sourdough pancakes, and baking an incredible banana bread with sourdough in the mixture. In general, this sort of sourdough baking simply adds a more savoury or tangy flavour to your recipe. Charlotte has made crumpets with her starter and says they are delicious. My next goal is to make some sourdough pizza, trying to compete with Franco Manca in deliciousness. Maybe I’ll have to buy a pizza oven…

Tag: sourdough

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