Maintaining a Sourdough Starter

vegan, refined sugar-free, nut-free

If you have an active sourdough starter​, you are just minutes away from making sourdough scallion pancakes, an hour and a half away from making sourdough crackers, and a few hours away from making a light and flavorful loaf of bread or a fluffy and flavorful pizza crust! Just like my Soft Gruyère, the instructions may seem like a lot, but it takes only minimal hands-on time to maintain a starter. Feed once or twice per day if you want to keep it on your countertop, or feed just once per week if storing in the fridge. You can also freeze it if you want to take a break from making sourdough stuff.

Yield: doubles starter / Active time: 3 minutes / Total time: 12 hours-24 hours

Helpful Tools:

• kitchen scale
• wide-mouth jar or bowl
• silicone, plastic, or rubber spoon or spatula
• cloth napkin or coffee filter​
• rubber band (s)

Ingredients:

• about 45 g sourdough starter*
• 45 g flour**
• 45 g filtered water***

Directions:

1. Place the empty jar on your scale, then hit the tare button. This removes the weight of the jar from your measurements. Switch to grams on the scale. It should show 0g. ​
2. Now place the starter in the jar and take note of the weight. 
3. Hit the tare button again, and then add the same number of grams of flour.
4. Hit the tare button once more, and then add the same number of grams of water.
5. Stir well with your spoon/spatula and then cover the top with a cloth napkin or coffee filter, securing it with a rubber band.
6. If you want to be really accurate in determining when your starter is most active, place a 2nd rubber band around the jar to mark the current volume of starter.
7. When your starter has doubled in size, around 4-6 hours, it's most active and ready for bread baking.**** 
8. When the starter has deflated again and looks flat (12-24 hours), it's time to feed it again with equal parts flour and water to the current weight of the starter: if you're not using a lot of it in a recipe, you may want to "discard" some of this inactive starter by making sourdough scallion pancakes, sourdough crackers, or literally discarding in the trash. This is so you won't have to add so much flour and water or outgrow your vessel!.*****

*If you have any friends who use sourdough, they would probably be happy to give you a small amount of starter to get you started. You can also purchase a starter like this one. You can start with any weight, so don't worry if you don't have exactly 45 g. The idea is that you want to add an equal weight of flour and water to your starter.
**all-purpose or whole wheat work fine. You can also mix in a few grams of rye flour, which helps speed up the fermentation process (just make sure to keep the TOTAL amount of flour the same weight as the water). 
***Chlorine found in tap water can kill the active cultures in the starter, so do your best to remove the chlorine with a carbon filter or by allowing the water to sit out overnight.
****The amount of time will vary depending on room temperature.
*****Some people use a new jar every time so they can be super accurate with weighing the starter, but you can also memorize the weight of your jar and subtract that from the overall weight or just eyeball the volume to get a good idea of how much flour and water to add. I usually add between 30g and 100g depending on how much starter I appear to be starting with. It's most important that the amount of flour and water you add are exactly the same.

Volume just after mixing

Volume after fermenting for 5 hours - The light bubbliness and doubled volume mean it's ready for a bread recipe!