Build Your Starter

If you live near me - I’ll gladly give you some of my starter. If you know someone else with a starter, or even a local artisan bakery that makes sourdough, they would probably be happy to give you some. If you would prefer to make your own, here’s how.

It’s pretty simple. To start, you just need a one to one mix of flour and water. I recommend using unbleached white flour or whole wheat flour (or both) and filtered water. Bleached flour loses yeast through the bleaching process, which may make it harder or even impossible to build up a healthy, active starter. Whole wheat flour results in the most active starter in my experience, that’s primarily what I use. Filtered water is recommended because if you have trace amounts of bleach in your tap water, that’ll kill the bacteria you need in your starter. You can absolutely use unfiltered water and bleached flour if you want, maybe they’ll work great - these things are just recommendations to give you the best shot at a healthy, active starter.

Start with a 1:1 mix of water and flour in any container that you can cover loosely with a lid, kitchen towel or paper towel. I keep my starter in a large mason jar with paper towel rubber-banded on top. I recommend using a kitchen scale for the 1:1 mix. 1 cup of water will weigh more than 1 cup of flour. It really doesn’t matter how much you do tbh, I’d go for 25-50 grams or a few tablespoons-1/4 cup of each - something in that ballpark. You’re going to throw half of it away every day while you’re establishing your starter anyways - so don’t make a ton, the whole point of this process is to encourage the microscopic yeast and bacteria that naturally occurs all around us to start feeding on your flour and water mixture. Keep your starter in a warm place and feed it every day, multiple times a day if you're feeling ambitious.

Keep feeding your starter with a 1:1 mix, discard roughly half of your starter every time you feed. After about a week you should start to see some activity, bubbles forming and expansion of your starter - this is a good sign! It means you are cultivating bacteria and yeast and they are happy! After about two weeks, your starter should be able to reliably double in size and you can start baking.

Once your starter is established, you can store it in the fridge in between baking. This slows down the digestion of the bacteria and yeast so you can feed less often. I make sure to feed my starter right before I refrigerate it and then feed it every 2 weeks or so while I'm not using it. Make sure to give it a day out of the fridge to get happy and active again before you use it for baking. Also - if you see grey/brown liquid formed on the top of your starter (like in the picture on the left) after several weeks without feeding don't worry, that is a normal byproduct of the bacteria and yeast. Simply poor off the liquid and feed as usual.