How to Make a Sourdough Starter

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Learn our tips and tricks for making your own (successful) sourdough starter! Plus our favorite recipes for using up all the discard.

This post contains affiliate links, which means I make a small commission at no extra cost to you. See my full disclosure here.

What is Sourdough?

Sourdough is made through fermentation, using yeast that occurs naturally in our homes. Sounds pretty crazy, right? So we are essentially allowing a mixture of flour and water to ferment on our counter tops, making a sourdough starter.

This flour and water mixture needs to be “fed”, which means giving it more (equal parts) of water and flour. Ultimately, sourdough starter should be equal parts of starter, flour and water. This starter should be fed every 12 hours while active, or can be stored in the refrigerator for up to a week without being fed.

Sourdough starter is the yeast to recipes like bread, rolls, english muffins, pancakes, crackers, muffins, cookies, cakes and so much more.

Sourdough has many gut health benefits, and is healthier than traditional store-bought bread. Although bread making can be a little bit labor-intensive for the newbie sourdough owner, the end result is a beautiful and healthier loaf of bread.

Baking bread at home is very frugal, and with an active sourdough starter there is no shortage of goodies to make!

Our Sourdough Starter Journey

Getting started with sourdough isn’t always easy. In fact, I had several failed sourdough starter attempts before a successful starter grew in our home. Looking back, if I had done a bit more research earlier on I think those early starters may have worked!

Sourdough Starter: Things to Remember

When I first started out, I wish that I had done more research on sourdough before diving right in. I was skeptical about eating something that I left on my countertop to ferment. Sounds crazy, right? As a side note, I was also freaked out to eat my first farm fresh chicken egg. Something about harvesting a warm egg straight from under the chicken was a tad disturbing until I got used to it!

It’s important to learn how to “read” your sourdough. When it is hungry, it will be come more watery or develop a black liquid over top. This black liquid is called “hooch” and it’s harmless. The hooch can be poured off, or mixed into the starter again.

Sometimes sourdough starter gets crusty when it’s hungry. I’ve thrown away more than one starter because of crust … had I only known! My starter will crust if it’s in a container with a wide mouth such as a glass bowl, so I always store my starter in jars slightly away from a heat source. If the starter develops crust, just remove the crust parts and keep going!

It is better to underfeed than overfeed. I would estimate that twice per week I only feed my starter once per day rather than twice. The starter doesn’t mind a bit, and gets super active after being fed on the days I don’t have time for that other feeding!

Useful Tools for Sourdough

This post contains affiliate links, which means I make a small commission at no extra cost to you. See my full disclosure here.

Sourdough starter doesn’t react well to metal, so be sure to store your starter in glass jars. Stirring and measuring should be done with silicone or plastic, again just avoid metal as not to damage the yeast that we’ve tried so hard to grow!

• Sourdough Bread Making Starter Kit: My husband actually got into sourdough before I did, and ordered this kit when we first started out. We love this, and it comes with all of the bread making essentials such as the banneton proofing basket, metal lame, dough scraper and non-metal measuring spoon.
• Digital Scale: Okay, using a scale was a game changer for me and it’s ultimately what led to our sourdough success. More on that below!
• Cast Iron Dutch Oven: This is the dutch oven we use and love for making sourdough bread (and everything else).
• Flour: we started ours with bleached all-purpose, because that was what we had on hand. After the first couple of weeks I did switch it to unbleached all-purpose and now only feed my starter with unbleached.
• Water

How to Make a Sourdough Starter

I have read and followed so many sourdough starter recipes and posts. The method that worked was from Dirt and Dough and you can view it HERE. Kristin’s simple tutorial uses a digital scale to measure out precisely the right amount of flour and water, making her method so simple.

Sourdough Starter Hack

So after following Kristin’s awesome sourdough starter instructions, I quickly found myself on day 10 of my sourdough starter. The starter was smelling great, bubbling, but not rising at all.

I tried starving it and then feeding it again, and I still couldn’t get it to rise. I thought I had failed another sourdough starter! Before leaving the house for work in the mornings, I would feed the starter and then carry it upstairs to my son’s room where it was the warmest. In the evenings I would feed it again and put it by the wood stove … still nothing.

Then my husband had an idea. “What if we put some yeast in it?” At first I wasn’t into it … but then I figured why not give it a try?

So here’s what we did:

• 1C Flour
• 1 C Water
• 1 C Sourdough Starter (on day 10ish)

We mixed this into a very large plastic jar (once used for coconut oil) and it grew like crazy. I left this mixture someplace warm for just over two days without feeding it, just stirring once or twice per day.

Then, I cut it down to about 100 grams (and used the rest for discard) and treated it like typical sourdough starter. Because we used a starter that was almost two weeks old, it already had some yeast in it and had the classic sourdough aroma. Adding some yeast jump started the process, and gave a little extra “oomph” that my starter needed to become more mature and rise.

Sourdough Starter Consistency

Everyone’s sourdough will be different, act different or even smell a little different. Keeping sourdough starter at 100% saturation (meaning equal parts of starter, flour and water) is common practice. My starter becomes too thick with this method. We had to play around with the consistency until I got it to work best in our home. We use equal parts of starter and flour, then two extra grams of water.

Taking a Sourdough Starter Break

Sourdough is a labor of love, and flour. We joke about the pounds of flour we go through here in the farmhouse! If you need to take a break from sourdough, just throw your fed starter into the fridge.

Refrigerated starter should be fed weekly, so bring it to room temperature for several hours before feeding and then place somewhere warm.

What do to with Sourdough Discard?

Being a busy family of four, we don’t have time to bake from scratch every day. But what to do with that precious sourdough discard we’ve worked so hard for?

Just to clarify, sourdough discard is the excess starter that is removed during feeding. The purpose of discarding is so that you aren’t wasting excessive amounts of flour and water.

We throw all of our discard into a big jar in the fridge, and add discard to it all week long. On the weekends, we make everything sourdough to use up the discard. Monday morning, we start the process over again with a fresh jar.

Our Favorite Sourdough Discard Recipes

Anything flat can be made with sourdough discard, these are our favorite recipes so far:

• Crackers: This is my favorite sourdough discard recipe so far, because one batch of crackers uses up a full cup of discard! This is a great way to use up that discard quickly. We love to make rosemary crackers, and crackers with “everything but the bagel” seasoning.
• Pancakes: Freezer friendly option here, we make a double batch and throw them right into the freezer when cool.
• Tortillas: These tortillas are very easy to make, and freeze quite well!

Our Favorite Sourdough Resources

• How to Start a Sourdough Starter
• Sourdough Starter FAQs
• Overnight Sourdough Bread
• English Muffins

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Huge thank you to Kristin from Dirt and Dough, as well as my dear friend Marissa from Meet Us In Our Garden for giving me the inspiration and direction to get started with sourdough again!