Sourdough: getting started

My sourdough technique has come on a bit since my first loaf. During the first three months of my year of breadmaking I’ve baked with my sourdough starter every week. Admittedly I do still have the occasional (albeit minor) disaster, but I’m feeling more confident now about sharing my sourdough method. So, that’s what I’m going to be doing here this week.

Let’s start at the beginning. To make a loaf of sourdough bread you need a sourdough starter. As I mentioned before, I was lucky enough to get my starter from a friend, who spent last summer WOOFing in France (and has been writing about his experiences here). It’s not that difficult to make your own, though. You mix together equal amounts of some kind of wholegrain flour and water (I used half a cup of each) and leave it for a few days to start bubbling. Once it starts bubbling you start feeding, by discarding most of the mixture and topping it up with equal quantities of flour and water. Once you’ve done this every day for a week or so you should end up with a well established starter that’s ready to be turned into bread.

In my (somewhat limited) experience it seems that getting a sourdough starter to start fermenting is not hard. The difficulty lies in keeping it alive after your initial enthusiasm begins to wane. Sourdough starters really will not tolerate neglect. When I came back from the River Cottage bread course, I decided that I would make my own starters – one entirely from rye flour and one from spelt. Both of them were bubbling away nicely (the spelt one took hardly any time at all to take off), but I found that I just could not be relied upon to take care of three pots of frothy goo as well as two small boys. I managed to salvage the rye one. It lives in my freezer now, a back up in case of a future starter-death emergency. The spelt one was not so lucky and ended up in the bin.

I now have a much better system. My sourdough starter lives in an old takeaway box in the fridge. I take it out once a week, a day or so before I want to bake with it. I feed it and leave it at room temperature until it starts bubbling again. And then I use it to bake.

How I make and bake my sourdough bread will be the topic of my next post. There is, however, one bit of the process that I think plays quite an important role in maintaining the health of my starter. I start the baking process by making a levain (in Tartine Bread terms) or a sponge (if you read the River Cottage Bread book). The night before (if I plan to mix up the dough in the morning) or first thing in the morning (if I plan to mix up the dough in the evening) I transfer a few tablespoons of starter into a clean bowl. I add 200g of flour and 200g of water, give it a good stir, cover it with a cloth and leave it to ferment. Once the levain/sponge is safely in its new bowl I empty out the contents of my takeaway container (either into the bin or into some pancake batter) and give it a good wash. Once I’ve used as much of the levain/sponge as I need to bake bread (more on this next time – promise), I return the rest to this nice clean container and put it back in the fridge until the following week, when the whole process begins all over again.

Cleaning the starter’s container may not be a necessary step. I’ve not read of anyone else doing it, but I’m a little bit scared of mould. My very first sourdough starter, even though I fed it religiously, went mouldy around the edges and went swiftly thereafter into the bin. This is not going to happen again.