Sourdough Starter for Beginners

We kind of stumbled into this sourdough game. Tobias bought a sourdough starter at the grocery store to make bread with, and it just escalated from there. 

Instead of making bread, we decided to use it as a base to kick start the sourdough starter. 

What you need to make a sourdough starter are actually just two ingredients: water and flour. 

Below is how we did it! At the bottom is also our key takeaways and learnings from making our first starter!

This is how our bread ended up, and it was DELICIOUS ?

What you need: 

• Sourdough starter – optional
• Water
• Flour – we used ecological sifted flour

What to do: 

Day 1

First, I poured the starter in a jar and added:

• 75 g of water
• 75g of sifted flour
• Mixed it all together and left it for 12 hours in the pantry. 
• Remember to put a tape where the dough is so you can see how much it grows
  

Day 2

• Removed 150g of sourdough 
• Added another 75g of water and 75g of sifted flour
  

Day 3

• Repeated the process of day 2
• But increased the sifted flour to 100g and added 75g of water

Leave it overnight 

Day 4

• We repeated the process of day 3 adding 100g of sifted flour and 75g of water

On day 4 we baked! 

• Before we baked we tested if the sourdough could float. What we learned was that if it could float the sourdough was ready to bake with. After feeding it 5 hours before we wanted to bake on day 4, it floated.

If you want to see how the process was for us, check out this video

Our experiences

• Using a sourdough starter might have reduced the process a couple of days, but it really wasn’t necessary, we could have just started without it from scratch.
• Buying a starter really kick-started our efforts to make sourdough bread, we’d thought about it for some time, but just hadn’t gotten around to it
• The sourdough bread we baked using the starter was very fluffy and tasty, so I’d have to say the sourdough starter was a success
• Mix the flour and water together in a separate bowl, then mix it into the rest of the starter
• Use a jar that is not too big so it’s easy to mix it all together
• In one Youtube video, it was recommended to use chopsticks. However, that did not turn out too well, it was a real mess! After that, I used a longer spoon, which was a much greater success ?
• When you take out sourdough you can make a scallion pancake. Just cook the excess starter in a pan, add some spring onions, sesame seeds, salt, and olive oil.