9 Recipes Using Sourdough Starter (2024)

FAQs

What can I do with all my sourdough starter? ›

Do I have to discard my sourdough starter? It would be best to discard some portion of your starter each time you feed it unless you want to continue to let it grow. Eventually, you need to discard the used food (flour and water) that's sustained your starter during the last fermentation period.

Blackley's sourdough starter, created from 4,500 year-old yeast, is considered the oldest sourdough starter, per Oldest. Other starters like the Saint Honoratus Wheat also are quite old. A bakery called Chrissi's Farmhouse Bakery uses it and said, “This noble starter dates back 900 years.

After a few days, your daily 1/4 cup flour and water won't be enough to sustain your entire jar of starter, and your starter will be slow and sluggish, not much better than discard itself. But that's not necessarily a bad thing, depending on what you want to bake with it.

Storing your sourdough starter in the fridge will require feeding around once a week. It can, however, be stored up to two months in the fridge without being fed. Reviving a sourdough starter that has been stored in the fridge for a longer period of time is a good idea.

Typical signs of food spoilage and mold include pink, orange, or green colors, white fuzzy spots, or sometimes areas that are darker with white areas on top. If you see any of these signs, I would recommend throwing your starter away and creating a new one.

While the age of your starter won't make your bread any better — turns out, only good sourdough practices can do that — it's a link in the long legacy of sourdough, one of the oldest forms of baking that exists. Whether your starter is a week or a decade old, you can become part of that lineage as well.

Mother - this is the overall dough culture that lives in a bowl in your fridge. We take portions from it to make our ferments (Starter) for our sourdough recipes. When the mother culture gets low, we add to it (feed it).

Yes, it's safe and possible to store your sourdough starter if you want to take a break from baking bread. You can store your starter for short periods (up to a week or three) in the refrigerator, or months by drying it out, or even years by completely dehydrating it and saving the dried pieces in a sealed container.

In order to allow your starter to grow and flourish, you need to "refresh" it with fresh flour and water. Discarding some first allows you to add this fresh food, whilst maintaining your starter at a manageable size.

What happens if you forgot to discard starter before feeding? ›

Maybe you're going for a more sour flavor. If you don't discard, you're gonna have all that. unactive starter in there that's hungry. and it's gonna give you more sour.

The best flour blend for creating a new sourdough starter is 50% whole-meal flour (whole wheat or whole rye) and 50% bread flour or all-purpose flour. I recommend a 50/50 mix of whole wheat flour and bread flour. Why do you need to use these two types of flour?

The more starter you use, the faster your dough will ferment - resulting in a less sour loaf. Of course the amount of starter is actually a ratio in relation to the flour - so 50g of starter to 500g of flour will ferment at a much slower rate than 200g of starter to 500g of flour.

Drying or dehydrating your active sourdough starter is a simple way to effectively preserve it longer term, especially if you dry it and then freeze it. You'll want to feed your starter 4-12 hours before drying, making sure it's active and bubbly.

Dried sourdough starter lasts indefinitely, and can be brought back to life with water and flour when you're finally ready to bake again.

If you didn't discard it, you'd also eventually have an unwieldy sum. You can always use this discard by directly mixing it into a dough for baking. Your discard, as long as it's in good shape, will leaven any bread dough just as well. The discard is just like a levain you would make for a recipe.