Do this ONE thing to improve your sourdough starter 400% right now!
j/k this isn't YouTube
Over on the Breaducation Substack, I am sharing early versions of the recipes that will end up in the book, along with some experiments that I’d like my testers to explore with me. But there’s a lot more that is going to go into the book that I’m not yet sharing anywhere, and I thought it might be fun to share sneak previews of it with my paid subscribers, as a thank you for being supporters of my work, especially since the sorts of recipes I’m “giving” away over there are the ones I would normally share here.
What I am hoping to do with Breaducation is not compile what I already know about baking bread, but instead to first question everything I think I know about baking bread, in order to make sure my choices are the best/most efficient/easiest ones and my knowledge of baking science and technique is as accurate and up-to-date as possible.
One place I’ve been rethinking my approach to recently is sourdough starter maintenance. And while it is early days still, I have stumbled upon a new method of maintaining a sourdough starter for home bakers that I think is worth trying out, especially if — like many of us — you don’t bake with it more than once a week. I think it should do a better job of keeping the starter in tip-top shape between bakes than the approach I usually use, and it will probably improve the overall health of a starter over time, without any extra effort. It is a very minor change, but one that I think is quite significant in its effects.
I last wrote about starters here just this past March:
To be clear, this new approach changes nothing about what I said back then, since that post was entirely about how to refresh a starter in preparation for baking (aka a “levain build”). What I have to share today is a new approach to storing a starter in between uses, or what one might call a “maintenance” refreshment.