The first step to making sourdough bread is making sourdough starter. Sourdough starter is essentially a “mother culture:” a living colony of yeast that you’ll use to leaven your sourdough. Some people can keep a starter alive for years; commercial bakers have sourdough strains that are who knows how old.

The process is simple: take flour and water, mix it up, and let it sit. Lather, rinse, repeat. Eventually, you end up with a thriving Yeast Mother that you can use to make loaves galore! Who knew microbiology could be so much fun?

Note: this process takes about 5 days, so build your starter well in advance of when you plan to bake.

Ingredients

to make The Starter:

• 50 grams whole wheat flour
• 50 grams cool water

to feed the starter:

• 50g flour
• 50g water

Process

For the first two days, you’ll feed your starter once a day. Days 3-5 require twice-daily feedings. Then you can move your starter to the fridge and feed it weekly.

General Feeding process

In general, you’ll use a 1:1:1 ratio of starter:water:flour to keep your starter alive. We use 50 grams of starter, 50 grams of water, and 50 grams of flour.

Day One: build

1. In a non-reactive container – e.g., glass, stainless steel, crockery, or food-grade plastic if you like microplastics – combine the water and the flour.
   Note: Select a container with room for the starter to grow.
   
2. Stir thoroughly. Cover loosely, and let the mix sit at room temperature (about 70 degrees) for 24 hours.

Day two: feed

1. Transfer the starter to a bowl. Don’t wash your starter’s vessel.
2. Transfer 50g of the starter back into the vessel.
3. Add 50g flour and 50g water.
4. Mix, cover, and let rest for 24 hours.

Days three-five: feed feed feed

It’s important to try to feed the starter at regularly spaced intervals. Ideally, you’d feed it every 12 hours; realistically that might not work. Just try your best.

Your starter should start to smell a little acidic and tangy. This is good!

1. Transfer the starter to a bowl. Don’t wash your starter’s vessel.
2. Transfer 50g of the starter back into the vessel.
3. Add 50g flour and 50g water to the starter.
4. Mix, cover, and let rest for 12 hours.

Day 6: Bake and store

Your starter now should be pretty vigorous. There should be a lot of bubbles on the surface. It should have a nice, tangy smell. If it’s not quite there yet, you can continue the vigorous feeding from the previous steps until it is vigorous.

You can now either bake a nice sourdough loaf. Or pizza, or waffles…so many things you can do with sourdough starter! Those recipes will trickle in here over time, or you can get a cookbook.

You can also store and maintain your sourdough starter.

Storing and maintaining your yeasty pal

If you want to keep your starter at room temperature:

1. Every 24 hours, transfer to a bowl. Return 50 grams of starter to your container.
2. Feed the starter 50 grams of flour and 50 grams of water.

If you want to keep your starter in the refrigerator (we recommend this):

1. Once a week, take your starter out of the fridge. There may be liquid on top of it; just mix it in, it’s fine.
2. Transfer the starter to a bowl. Don’t wash the container.
3. Transfer 50 grams of the starter into the container, and feed it 50 grams of flour and 50 grams of water.
4. Let rest at room temperature 1-2 hours.
5. Return to the refrigerator.

Baking with Refrigerated starter

This is super vague and I’m sorry about that, but this process varies widely depending on a million ambient conditions. The key idea here: before baking sourdough bread, your starter needs to be vigorous enough to double in size in about 8 hours. With that in mind:

About 3 days before you bake, take the starter out of the fridge and feed it, following the usual method. Leave it out.

If it hasn’t doubled in size in 24 hours, feed it every 8-12 hours until it doubles.

Once it is vigorous and doubles in size within about 6-8 hours of feeding, give it the Final Feeding:

1. Set aside 50 grams of starter in the sourdough’s home container and feed it 50 grams of flour and 50 grams of water.
2. To the remaining starter, add enough flour and water to give you however much you need for your recipe. Our sourdough recipe calls for 1 cup of starter, which is about 227 grams; so we would weigh out how much starter we have, subtract that number from 227, divide by two, and give that number of grams of water and flour to the starter.
3. Let the starter feed for 4-6 hours before baking with it.