Have been using a sourdough starter for about 5 years, but always added commercial yeast. Last year I finally took the plunge and didn't use the yeast! Haven't used yeast since to make everything from pizza to silky cinnamon buns and coffee cakes. I am fascinated with any and all information I can find about using sourdough starters, but the one thing that puzzles me is the requirement to discard when feeding the starter. I have never discarded any of my starter. I remove it from the refrigerator, let it come to room temp, feed it before using, measure out what I need, feed it again, then put it back in the refrigerator. I have never had too much.
Hi loafers! My starter came from a friend about a year back (after struggling for months to get my own quarentiny starter “beasty” going while bouncing between two states every few weeks, I decided I’d be much less stressed with a mature one). It survived a move from CA to TX in the car, and despite some neglect, perks back up after a few feedings and has made lovely biscuits and crackers. I keep it in the fridge mostly and refresh it every two weeks or so at a 2:2:1 ratio of unbleached ap flour, filtered water, and starter, unless I’m baking, then I’ll pull it out. Last week after pulling it out it took about 12 hours to triple, then the second refresh only took 4-6 so it gets going quick and looks just plain happy to be alive! I’d like to get into more of a habit of baking weekly.
Hi! I got my starter from my step dad 4 years ago, and I've since returned a portion to him after he got off the bread train and back on again. I only feed my starter when I'm going to bake a loaf -- usually every week but sometimes it goes 2-3 weeks in the fridge between bakes. I'll take it out, mix 50g starter / 100g flour / 100g filtered tap water, and let it grow in a bowl on the counter, covered with a plate, for 4-6 hours in the summer, or overnight in the winter. Then I bake with 180-200g (the base recipe from Tartine) and put the rest in a clean jar in the fridge. I used to prefer using it after it fell -- somehow it made the fermentation in the recipe easier to manage. Now... I'm experimenting with using it just after it's doubled, while it's still growing, and I find these loaves much harder to manage (but that could also be summer baking!)
The only times I feed and discard are (1) if I haven't baked in more than 4 weeks and (2) if I'm doing an enriched dough like babka / cinnamon rolls / croissants where the dough needs extra oomph.
My starter, Babka Yaga, is about 18 months old and doing well. I usually bake with her once a week but make multiple loaves, so I refrigerate and refresh every 7-10 days. Doubling is 4-6 hours, typically closer to 4 these days, although we will see as temperatures cool. I do 100% hydration with King Arthur bread flour. I keep a back up but haven’t used it and I save my discard for mostly biscuits, crackers and popovers although I am always interested in other uses!
i didnt i lntroduce myself last week-i live in alaska where i have been baking sourdough for the last 6 years. having read a lot about the gold rush, andthe role of sourdough in the hard lives of those crazed people, i was very intrigued. as prospectors traveled into the interior from southeast AK, they crossed through canada, where the mounties required they have a certain amount (in weight) of supplies for survival. massive amounts of flour was common...
i also was lent an amazing book about sheep herders in central idaho (where i grew up), and sourdough was a backbone of their hard, active, and mobile, way of life.
the role of bread, and specifically sourdough, in these lifestyles is what made me grow one myself. i had gotten clouded by all the "hype" and intense vocab, and all the tools deemed "neccesaary" for sourdough baking.... if people
survived -40° winters with hardly anything besides a firm will, dry matches, and the sourdough kept inside their jacket in an old tobacco tin... surely i could do this too! this realization of function freed me from feeding schedules, crumb structure stress, folding and coiling nuances.
and now, that i (have just begun to!) understand "how it all works", i am learning the reasons behind folds and schedules and the resulting crumb. how fricking cool. it almost feels that the more i bake, the more i have to learn.
i also am a very proud owner of a dough whisk, which i cannot imagine baking 3x/week without. and truly, using a scale is what most transformed my baking from inconsistent-but-delicious experiments into reliably amazing (tho yes, i admit bias!) works of art.
i am working a crazy schedule right now, but still bake the same, so i feed my starter (usually 50g of it left in the container) the amount i need
for two loaves. 190g white flour: 190g water. i feed it before bed, mix my dough in the morning, and by the time i get home from work, its ready for shaping andbaking. definitelly a "survival" loaf method, and not as developed a result as the Loaf classic, or even the Loaf, without any strengthenig. but the starter thrives on the routine, since its fed and used often. i put it in a cooler or cold
place
the days between bakes, and it holds so well. given this success for me, i am very curious why there are so many feeding suggestions and recipes that create such a massive amount of startert through a rigorous feeding routine, and use a small enough portion there is a lot of "discard". what is the added benefit in a schedule like that?
thanks so much for this newsletter, i am learning so much
As I mentioned in my earlier posting, I started my beasties with whole white flour using the King Arthur recipe. (I avoid plain all purpose white flour for health reasons.) The KA recipe called for 1 cup flour and 1/2 cup water. I continued with that ratio after the starter had reached maturity but it made the calculations of hydration complicated. So I then started a second batch using 1:1. That is, I would take a cup of sourdough out of the starter and replace it with 3/4 cup water and 3/4 cup flour. But this 1 to 1 although thriving, became watery. I didn't find it satisfying to work with it. So I moved to 1 to1 but using weight instead of volume. I keep around 2.5 cups in a glass jar in the fridge and replenish it weekly. After coming to room temperature I take out 1 cup and use it as is for bread or if we haven’t finished the last loaf I use it for pancakes, waffles, etc. and then put in 3/4 cup of whole white flour which I weigh before adding it to the mother ship. I then put the 3/4 cup measure back on the scale and add water until I have the same weight as the flour. I add that, stir and after it rises about 50% put it back in the fridge for a week. I like this "texture" much more than the other two and it serves me well. I sometimes put in more starter than a recipe calls to compensate for the whole white flour don't ask me why, my gut tells me so and it seems to give a better loaf, with a stronger flavour, which my wife and I like. Changing the amount of starter is why knowing the hydration of the starter is important to me.
I'm pleased to learn from the rest of this crowd that the starter it is more robust than I had thought and letting it sit for an extra day in the fridge isn't going to kill it.
My starter, Gus, has never been better! He's taken quite a bit of neglect over the years, with regular long fridge incubations of upwards of 1-2 months before I would dig him out and feed a few times at room temp to revive (definitely always a nice amount of hooch to decant!). Also Gus was very hard to revive after a 9-hour drive in our last move, not sure if it got way too overgrown despite the cooler or what; almost seemed like it needed some time to get used to the new local water, haha. During the pandemic, as I got more into trying different sourdough recipes I picked up from all over, I baked more sourdough-only bread (as opposed to discard-based recipes) than ever before, and so I was refreshing Gus on a weekly, rather than monthly, basis, and I could be over-interpreting things, but I feel like my starter is now almost overactive compared to the activity level most recipes are written for (and I don't live in a tropical climate), so it makes me wonder if I've selected for super-strength yeast strains through a semi-hostile environment of years of neglect. So many recipes tell you to do the levain for 12 hrs or overnight, and mine has meanwhile tripled and fallen by hour 6. Andrew, do you think this is possible, from a mycology standpoint, to select for hardy strains through environmental pressure? And am I just being silly and I should let my levain for the bread recipe incubate for the 12 hours if it says so in the recipe, rather than trying to take it at the "peak" exponential phase point, which for me is usually 4-6 hrs?
On the topic of discard - I bought the original Alaska Sourdough book by Ruth Allman recently, and the basic pancake/waffle sourdough recipe is A+ and uses a whole 2 cups of discard at a time and is reasonable in how many pancakes/waffles it produces, and is same day (no overnight rise!). Love it!
The quarantiny starter project was my first introduction to sourdough, about a week after the pandemic started. Learning to bake sourdough during the pandemic has really been a blessing, it gave me a sense of momentum and productivity even when I couldn’t leave my house. I’m really into it now and my family jokes it’s gotten out of hand. I went from never baking to purchasing a pizza oven and buying flour in bulk!
My starter is called “Dwight D Rise n’ Sour” and I refresh him every week or two on a 2-2-1 ratio. Usually it takes 4-6 hours to double. Mostly I bake loaves to eat with soup. I use your loaf recipe from “day 21ish” and just change out flour types/proportions or add mix-ins as desired. On Sundays I use the discard for cinnamon raisin bread or popovers. So all in all Dwight is going strong!
Going to have to pull my starter out again. Living in Peru (hot/damp or hot/dry sometimes in the same week) I've had a rough time keeping it counter-top active as opposed to frig stored.
Currently trying to revive my starter "Constance" using equal parts rye and AP flour. I started her at the bakery I worked in. While we were using it there, I didn't maintain one at home, because anytime I wanted to bake a loaf, I just grabbed discard from work! I managed to get some discard recently from a former coworker, baked a lovely loaf from Bryan Ford's New World Sourdough, then started inconsistently feeding it. I feed in a 2:2:1 ratio of flour, water, and starter. It's not going great, but I've also not been very disciplined about my scheduled feedings. You all have inspired me to get my act together!
My starter originally came from someone who said it came from someone who got it from the August First Bakery in Burlington, VT. Whatever, it has been mine for a number of years now, and serves me well. I refresh it at random times, and have a whole slew of recipes collected for the discard (many from King Arthur Baking) if I'm not baking with the active stuff right away. It mostly lives in the refrigerator, and I probably use it too often when it's not fully active. It works though, and I don't worry about that perfect artisanal crumb unless I have time for a three day process!
My no-name starter was born during quarantine and is going strong. I try to feed it once a week, but sometimes that stretches out to 10 days. I'm still going with Andrew's original recommendation of 100g starter, 200g flour (I do 10-20g of rye, rest all-purpose), 200g of filtered water. Starter gets taken from the fridge, mixed with the flour and water, and the placed in my oven with the oven light on. It doubles in size in about 6 hours.
What kind of jars/containers do you all use? I'm using Adam's peanut butter jars -- nice straight sides make stirring easy, and I've weighed them so it's easy for me to see how much starter is inside one when I pop it on the scale.
I call my starter the Little Guys (it's not really a name, more like a description). It took me a LONG time (maybe like 2 months) to start it up last year, probably because I had no clue what I was doing, and didn't know what to look/smell/feel for (to Andrew's point from last week about how you really need to learn and develop intuition by doing). Ever since I got it going in late summer, though, it's been hanging in there pretty well. I joke that it was my biggest accomplishment of 2020 (though I don't think that's too much of a joke, actually).
At this point, I am in a groove of refreshing once a week, usually on Sunday. I do a 2:2:1 ratio of unbleached AP, distilled water, and starter. Up until two weeks ago, it was doubling in about 4 hours, but the last two refreshes have been quite a bit slower. I'm assuming this is weather-related, as it got a lot cooler here. I bake when I have time to, which usually ends up being about twice or thrice per month. I almost always make the oatmeal porridge loaf, occasionally The Loaf. I wish I had more time to branch out and experiment.
My starter's name is "Smidl." I started Smidl about 20 years ago at a class at the San Francisco Baking Institute. Over the years I've given away 20-40 samples of Smidl to other bakers. I like to imagine that some of them have given away Smidl. And thus Smidl is slowly taking over the world. Bwahahaha!
Smidl cheerfully tolerates quite a bit of benign neglect. I leave it in the fridge for weeks on end. But then after a few refreshment cycles, it comes back strong!
I refresh in the mass ratio of:
100% bread flour (occasionally including a bit of rye for nutrients)
50% water
10%-20% mature Smidl
Repeat every 12 hours.
I use a food processor to mix my refreshments because I imagine that its blades incorporate more air/oxygen into the dough, which the yeast find helpful for reproducing. It seems to work wonders...but this has not been scientifically tested.
Have been using a sourdough starter for about 5 years, but always added commercial yeast. Last year I finally took the plunge and didn't use the yeast! Haven't used yeast since to make everything from pizza to silky cinnamon buns and coffee cakes. I am fascinated with any and all information I can find about using sourdough starters, but the one thing that puzzles me is the requirement to discard when feeding the starter. I have never discarded any of my starter. I remove it from the refrigerator, let it come to room temp, feed it before using, measure out what I need, feed it again, then put it back in the refrigerator. I have never had too much.
Hi loafers! My starter came from a friend about a year back (after struggling for months to get my own quarentiny starter “beasty” going while bouncing between two states every few weeks, I decided I’d be much less stressed with a mature one). It survived a move from CA to TX in the car, and despite some neglect, perks back up after a few feedings and has made lovely biscuits and crackers. I keep it in the fridge mostly and refresh it every two weeks or so at a 2:2:1 ratio of unbleached ap flour, filtered water, and starter, unless I’m baking, then I’ll pull it out. Last week after pulling it out it took about 12 hours to triple, then the second refresh only took 4-6 so it gets going quick and looks just plain happy to be alive! I’d like to get into more of a habit of baking weekly.
I love the idea of taking Cindy or Gus (or whatever your starter’s name is) on a vacation! But could they get through security at the airport? 😈
Will try that suggestion. Thank you!
Hi! I got my starter from my step dad 4 years ago, and I've since returned a portion to him after he got off the bread train and back on again. I only feed my starter when I'm going to bake a loaf -- usually every week but sometimes it goes 2-3 weeks in the fridge between bakes. I'll take it out, mix 50g starter / 100g flour / 100g filtered tap water, and let it grow in a bowl on the counter, covered with a plate, for 4-6 hours in the summer, or overnight in the winter. Then I bake with 180-200g (the base recipe from Tartine) and put the rest in a clean jar in the fridge. I used to prefer using it after it fell -- somehow it made the fermentation in the recipe easier to manage. Now... I'm experimenting with using it just after it's doubled, while it's still growing, and I find these loaves much harder to manage (but that could also be summer baking!)
The only times I feed and discard are (1) if I haven't baked in more than 4 weeks and (2) if I'm doing an enriched dough like babka / cinnamon rolls / croissants where the dough needs extra oomph.
My starter, Babka Yaga, is about 18 months old and doing well. I usually bake with her once a week but make multiple loaves, so I refrigerate and refresh every 7-10 days. Doubling is 4-6 hours, typically closer to 4 these days, although we will see as temperatures cool. I do 100% hydration with King Arthur bread flour. I keep a back up but haven’t used it and I save my discard for mostly biscuits, crackers and popovers although I am always interested in other uses!
loafers! (i am proud to be a loafer!)
i didnt i lntroduce myself last week-i live in alaska where i have been baking sourdough for the last 6 years. having read a lot about the gold rush, andthe role of sourdough in the hard lives of those crazed people, i was very intrigued. as prospectors traveled into the interior from southeast AK, they crossed through canada, where the mounties required they have a certain amount (in weight) of supplies for survival. massive amounts of flour was common...
i also was lent an amazing book about sheep herders in central idaho (where i grew up), and sourdough was a backbone of their hard, active, and mobile, way of life.
the role of bread, and specifically sourdough, in these lifestyles is what made me grow one myself. i had gotten clouded by all the "hype" and intense vocab, and all the tools deemed "neccesaary" for sourdough baking.... if people
survived -40° winters with hardly anything besides a firm will, dry matches, and the sourdough kept inside their jacket in an old tobacco tin... surely i could do this too! this realization of function freed me from feeding schedules, crumb structure stress, folding and coiling nuances.
and now, that i (have just begun to!) understand "how it all works", i am learning the reasons behind folds and schedules and the resulting crumb. how fricking cool. it almost feels that the more i bake, the more i have to learn.
i also am a very proud owner of a dough whisk, which i cannot imagine baking 3x/week without. and truly, using a scale is what most transformed my baking from inconsistent-but-delicious experiments into reliably amazing (tho yes, i admit bias!) works of art.
i am working a crazy schedule right now, but still bake the same, so i feed my starter (usually 50g of it left in the container) the amount i need
for two loaves. 190g white flour: 190g water. i feed it before bed, mix my dough in the morning, and by the time i get home from work, its ready for shaping andbaking. definitelly a "survival" loaf method, and not as developed a result as the Loaf classic, or even the Loaf, without any strengthenig. but the starter thrives on the routine, since its fed and used often. i put it in a cooler or cold
place
the days between bakes, and it holds so well. given this success for me, i am very curious why there are so many feeding suggestions and recipes that create such a massive amount of startert through a rigorous feeding routine, and use a small enough portion there is a lot of "discard". what is the added benefit in a schedule like that?
thanks so much for this newsletter, i am learning so much
As I mentioned in my earlier posting, I started my beasties with whole white flour using the King Arthur recipe. (I avoid plain all purpose white flour for health reasons.) The KA recipe called for 1 cup flour and 1/2 cup water. I continued with that ratio after the starter had reached maturity but it made the calculations of hydration complicated. So I then started a second batch using 1:1. That is, I would take a cup of sourdough out of the starter and replace it with 3/4 cup water and 3/4 cup flour. But this 1 to 1 although thriving, became watery. I didn't find it satisfying to work with it. So I moved to 1 to1 but using weight instead of volume. I keep around 2.5 cups in a glass jar in the fridge and replenish it weekly. After coming to room temperature I take out 1 cup and use it as is for bread or if we haven’t finished the last loaf I use it for pancakes, waffles, etc. and then put in 3/4 cup of whole white flour which I weigh before adding it to the mother ship. I then put the 3/4 cup measure back on the scale and add water until I have the same weight as the flour. I add that, stir and after it rises about 50% put it back in the fridge for a week. I like this "texture" much more than the other two and it serves me well. I sometimes put in more starter than a recipe calls to compensate for the whole white flour don't ask me why, my gut tells me so and it seems to give a better loaf, with a stronger flavour, which my wife and I like. Changing the amount of starter is why knowing the hydration of the starter is important to me.
I'm pleased to learn from the rest of this crowd that the starter it is more robust than I had thought and letting it sit for an extra day in the fridge isn't going to kill it.
My starter, Gus, has never been better! He's taken quite a bit of neglect over the years, with regular long fridge incubations of upwards of 1-2 months before I would dig him out and feed a few times at room temp to revive (definitely always a nice amount of hooch to decant!). Also Gus was very hard to revive after a 9-hour drive in our last move, not sure if it got way too overgrown despite the cooler or what; almost seemed like it needed some time to get used to the new local water, haha. During the pandemic, as I got more into trying different sourdough recipes I picked up from all over, I baked more sourdough-only bread (as opposed to discard-based recipes) than ever before, and so I was refreshing Gus on a weekly, rather than monthly, basis, and I could be over-interpreting things, but I feel like my starter is now almost overactive compared to the activity level most recipes are written for (and I don't live in a tropical climate), so it makes me wonder if I've selected for super-strength yeast strains through a semi-hostile environment of years of neglect. So many recipes tell you to do the levain for 12 hrs or overnight, and mine has meanwhile tripled and fallen by hour 6. Andrew, do you think this is possible, from a mycology standpoint, to select for hardy strains through environmental pressure? And am I just being silly and I should let my levain for the bread recipe incubate for the 12 hours if it says so in the recipe, rather than trying to take it at the "peak" exponential phase point, which for me is usually 4-6 hrs?
On the topic of discard - I bought the original Alaska Sourdough book by Ruth Allman recently, and the basic pancake/waffle sourdough recipe is A+ and uses a whole 2 cups of discard at a time and is reasonable in how many pancakes/waffles it produces, and is same day (no overnight rise!). Love it!
The quarantiny starter project was my first introduction to sourdough, about a week after the pandemic started. Learning to bake sourdough during the pandemic has really been a blessing, it gave me a sense of momentum and productivity even when I couldn’t leave my house. I’m really into it now and my family jokes it’s gotten out of hand. I went from never baking to purchasing a pizza oven and buying flour in bulk!
My starter is called “Dwight D Rise n’ Sour” and I refresh him every week or two on a 2-2-1 ratio. Usually it takes 4-6 hours to double. Mostly I bake loaves to eat with soup. I use your loaf recipe from “day 21ish” and just change out flour types/proportions or add mix-ins as desired. On Sundays I use the discard for cinnamon raisin bread or popovers. So all in all Dwight is going strong!
Going to have to pull my starter out again. Living in Peru (hot/damp or hot/dry sometimes in the same week) I've had a rough time keeping it counter-top active as opposed to frig stored.
Currently trying to revive my starter "Constance" using equal parts rye and AP flour. I started her at the bakery I worked in. While we were using it there, I didn't maintain one at home, because anytime I wanted to bake a loaf, I just grabbed discard from work! I managed to get some discard recently from a former coworker, baked a lovely loaf from Bryan Ford's New World Sourdough, then started inconsistently feeding it. I feed in a 2:2:1 ratio of flour, water, and starter. It's not going great, but I've also not been very disciplined about my scheduled feedings. You all have inspired me to get my act together!
My starter originally came from someone who said it came from someone who got it from the August First Bakery in Burlington, VT. Whatever, it has been mine for a number of years now, and serves me well. I refresh it at random times, and have a whole slew of recipes collected for the discard (many from King Arthur Baking) if I'm not baking with the active stuff right away. It mostly lives in the refrigerator, and I probably use it too often when it's not fully active. It works though, and I don't worry about that perfect artisanal crumb unless I have time for a three day process!
Hi Loafers,
My no-name starter was born during quarantine and is going strong. I try to feed it once a week, but sometimes that stretches out to 10 days. I'm still going with Andrew's original recommendation of 100g starter, 200g flour (I do 10-20g of rye, rest all-purpose), 200g of filtered water. Starter gets taken from the fridge, mixed with the flour and water, and the placed in my oven with the oven light on. It doubles in size in about 6 hours.
What kind of jars/containers do you all use? I'm using Adam's peanut butter jars -- nice straight sides make stirring easy, and I've weighed them so it's easy for me to see how much starter is inside one when I pop it on the scale.
Hi loafers!
I call my starter the Little Guys (it's not really a name, more like a description). It took me a LONG time (maybe like 2 months) to start it up last year, probably because I had no clue what I was doing, and didn't know what to look/smell/feel for (to Andrew's point from last week about how you really need to learn and develop intuition by doing). Ever since I got it going in late summer, though, it's been hanging in there pretty well. I joke that it was my biggest accomplishment of 2020 (though I don't think that's too much of a joke, actually).
At this point, I am in a groove of refreshing once a week, usually on Sunday. I do a 2:2:1 ratio of unbleached AP, distilled water, and starter. Up until two weeks ago, it was doubling in about 4 hours, but the last two refreshes have been quite a bit slower. I'm assuming this is weather-related, as it got a lot cooler here. I bake when I have time to, which usually ends up being about twice or thrice per month. I almost always make the oatmeal porridge loaf, occasionally The Loaf. I wish I had more time to branch out and experiment.
Happy loafing, all!
Hi, Loafers!
My starter's name is "Smidl." I started Smidl about 20 years ago at a class at the San Francisco Baking Institute. Over the years I've given away 20-40 samples of Smidl to other bakers. I like to imagine that some of them have given away Smidl. And thus Smidl is slowly taking over the world. Bwahahaha!
Smidl cheerfully tolerates quite a bit of benign neglect. I leave it in the fridge for weeks on end. But then after a few refreshment cycles, it comes back strong!
I refresh in the mass ratio of:
100% bread flour (occasionally including a bit of rye for nutrients)
50% water
10%-20% mature Smidl
Repeat every 12 hours.
I use a food processor to mix my refreshments because I imagine that its blades incorporate more air/oxygen into the dough, which the yeast find helpful for reproducing. It seems to work wonders...but this has not been scientifically tested.