Beginner’s Guide to Sourdough Starter
What is Starter?
Most breads you see in stores are yeasted doughs, which just means that they were made with yeast you can buy in the store. You use this for things like dinner rolls, pizza doughs, or even our naan recipe from April.
Sourdough is just wild yeast that’s been captured in the form of starter and developed in a way that is easier for our bodies to process. That’s why you always see sourdough dough taking hours or days to develop and rise when yeasted dough can take an hour. Sourdough actually ferments using naturally occurring lactobacilli and yeast.
Most people who can’t eat gluten are having trouble with how most modern bread is made because the raw ingredients aren’t broken down in a form we can easily take in. The wild yeast from the sourdough goes through the process for you in the form of fermentation(like beer or chocolate) and breaks down the phytic acids that can make it hard for us to process.
Cows and other animals have several stomachs, and part of those stomachs are specifically dedicated to fermenting grasses and other green leafy things. We don’t have that. The lactic acid that is produced through this process is what gives the breads their signature sour taste, breaks down the glutens, breaks down some natural proteins, and becomes a complex carbohydrate instead of a simple one.
Every protein(like gluten) is basically a bunch of bundled strands of gluten to create a ball of information. The slow fermentation process unravels that ball and breaks it up into individual strands of amino acids and peptides. That big ball is hard to process, but the individual strands are much easier. It’s like learning all information about your class on the first day vs learning everything over the course of a semester. It’s just easier to take in!
What’s It Used For?
Sourdough is an incredibly versatile, being used as anything from cakes to pastries to breads. Some of these uses include:
Bread
Pizza Dough
Popovers
Pancakes & Waffles
Biscuits
Basically anything you can make with yeast, you can make with sourdough!
White Flour vs Whole Grain
At the beginning of the 20th century food scientists have found a way to mass produce really white flour. This flour does not go bad, you can use it as long as you have it, so mills started to mass produce flour at large scale and sold it around the world. But to make flour white only a small part of the grain can be used, which in turn took away all of the nutritious benefits that the grain has in it. It turns out that in wheat grains there is everything that a person needs to survive. To make up for this fact food scientists started adding back minerals and nutrients artificially.
Is It Healthy?
While the sourdough itself isn’t necessarily healthy, the way you use it is what gives it it’s health benefits. Its slow fermentation process is what makes it so much easier to digest than its domesticated yeast counterpart.
Like all flour, it is mostly composed of carbs (carbohydrates), this is mostly in the form of starches. This is why when chewing sourdough bread after chewing for a bit there is a sweet taste coming through. That is our bodies converting carbs to sugar.
Whole wheat flour also contains 12-15% of fiber. Our bodies can’t digest fiber, but this fiber along with the carbs help feed our starter!
The most abundant protein in flour is gluten. Most of us have heard about gluten for diets and allergies, but gluten is the key ingredient in making bread! This protein is what allows bread to be so fluffy and gives it strength.
In the germ and the barn of the wheat there are a lot of minerals that are essential to our daily lives like:
Selenium
Essential for a lot of body functions
Manganese
This is a strong antioxidant as well it is essential for bone health
Phosphorus
Important mineral for body tissue growth
Copper
Together with iron it enables the body to form red blood cells
Folate
Also known as B9. This is especially important during pregnancy
The short answer is: yes, sourdough is healthy
Fool-Proof Sourdough Starter
Abel Dawson | 5/7/2021
prep time: 5 minuts
wait time: 5-7 days
- total time: 5-7 days
Servings: infinite if properly maintained
Ingredients:
100g High Quality Whole Wheat Flour, more nutritious for the starter, makes your starter faster and stronger
100g Lukewarm Water in a Cold Room OR Cold Water in a Hot Room
1L / 32oz Food Safe Container, I prefer mason jar/food safe plastic
Special Equipment: Cheesecloth (like this)
Instructions:
- In your container thoroughly mix your flour and water, cover with cheesecloth and secure it with a rubber band and let it sit for 24 hours.
- After 24 hours have passed discard 50g of your starter and add another 100g water and 100g flour, rest for 24 hours.
- After the second day you may start to see some small bubbles form in the starter. This is exactly what you want! Those bubbles are what are going to give the good rise to your bread!
- After 24 hours discard 100g of starter and add 100g water and 100g flour, let it rest for 24 hours and repeat for 4 days.
- After 7 days if it doubles in size a couple hours after feeding and/or if you take a spoonful it floats in a bowl of water the starter is ready to use!
- To keep the starter alive you have to continue the same feeding schedule as in step 4.
- Enjoy baking your beautiful sourdough bakes!.
Things To Look Out For:
- If you see really bright yellow or green on the starter it has gone bad!
- If the water is separating out from the starter it means that there is not enough food for the yeast. You have to change the feeding schedule to every 12 hours, or use higher quality flour!
- You can keep your starter in the fridge. This reduces the feeding frequency to once a week. Remember that it takes at least a full day to get the starter ready for baking after it was in the fridge.
- If the water is separating out from the starter it means that there is not enough food for the yeast. You have to change the feeding schedule to every 12 hours, or use higher quality flour!
- Before making anything sourdough you want to feed the starter so it gets the maximum strength when you incorporate it! I usually do 4-6 hours before baking if the starter was room temperature or if it’s in the fridge I take 12 hours for it to warm up before feeding and then another 6-12 hours before baking with it.
- If you can’t feed the starter for more than a week, you can always put it in the freezer, this method works, but I found the starter gets weaker. It takes a couple of days before it can be used again. First let it thaw for 24 hours in the fridge, then use the same method from keeping in the fridge to feed it. You might need to do 2 feedings this way to make sure you have enough yeast to bake
Looking to try out some more bread? Try these recipes!
