Starter Care

The starter or starter culture is the "seed" of the process and until fairly recently we failed to recognise just how critical it is in the process. Unlike a packet yeast which has very predictable performance and quantities are relatively standard in recipes, a sourdough culture is a living community of wild yeast and bacteria which are in a dynamic balance. Each time the conditions change, the health of the microorganisms and the relative quantities of species are affected. Thus, a teaspoon of starter today is not necessarily the same as a teaspoon yesterday or tomorrow.

While this might sound daunting, it's part of the mystery and art of bread baking. When one appreciates that this is a biological process of collaboration with other living organisms rather than a synthesis of a product by humans, you are ready to start.

Avoid Slack, Sticky Dough

One of the most critical things in ensuring a good bake is a starter that is active (has lots of bubbles) and fresh (has recently had a feed). If either of these is not true, you run the risk of having a dough that is slack and sticky even if you follow the recipe. It took us years to figure this out and only in recent times did we trace these symptoms back to our starter which lead us to change the way we store and build our preferment. Before we go there you may be interested in reading a bit about these slack and sticky doughs (proteolytic to use the biological term):

• A forum comment on proteolytic dough

Starter Good Practice

So our journey to good starter care came first by:

• Significantly reducing the amount of starter we stored (in the fridge) so that when we fed it the quantity of flour was 5 times or more the amount of starter (we used to only double the quantity).
• Having a "refresh" cycle (or two) if our starter had been in the fridge for > 5 days (refresh cycle involves discarding all but a residue of stored starter and feeding back up to the desired starter quantity)
• Ensuring our starter refresh didn't ferment for > 10 hours

To illustrate this we took a sequence of photos to illustrate how a starter (or dough) ferments:

Preparing Starter for Baking

This might be pedantic but it also might save you from flop bakes. If you're not baking regularly this method of starter "activation" or refresh is vital to good bread. This method can also be used to revive a very old starter or your piece of frozen starter you pull out your freezer when you've done the unthinkable and cleaned your starter container fully...

If you don't get the activity you need, repeat this process after tipping out and discarding all but a residue of the starter.