I’m going to give you the recipe and procedure right away because I hate blogs that make you scroll through their emotional journey before you get to the answer. Here you go.
Sourdough for the Optimistic Baker:
Combine in a glass/ceramic container with a loose-fitting lid:
1/3 C of bread flour
1/3 C room temperature water
Day 2 - stir your starter. Add another 1/3 C flour + 1/3 C water
Day 3 - stir your starter. Add another 1/3 C flour + 1/3 C water
Day 4 - stir your starter, Add another 1/3 C flour + 1/3 C water
*by this point you have quite a bit of starter going. It might start to smell sour and bubble a little if you’re lucky. It depends on your native yeast spores. You might discard some and make pancakes if you want to. It will keep your volume manageable.
Pancakes: medium-high heat or 350 degrees F
1/2 C starter
1 C milk
1 2/3 C flour (try 1 C white, 2/3C whole wheat)
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
2 tbsp brown sugar
1/4 C melted butter or vegetable oil
2 eggs
Combine starter and milk. Stir in flour, baking soda, salt and sugar. Mix together your butter and eggs and fold into the batter until incorporated. Don’t over mix. Cook as you would regular pancakes. Enough for about 4 people.
Day 5 - stir, add 1/3 C flour + 1/3 C water
Day 6 - stir, add 1/3 C flour + 1/3 C water
Day 7 - stir add 1/3 C flour + 1/3 C water
*You are likely ready to use up some more starter, but unless your starter is crazy bubbly and overflowing its container in a frothy mess, you’re not ready for bread. Try some muffins.
Blueberry Muffins: 375 degrees F
1 C sourdough starter
1/2 C vegetable oil (or melted butter)
3/4 C warm water
1 egg
1/2 C brown sugar or honey
1 tsp grated lemon zest
2 C flour (combo of white and whole wheat but no more than half whole wheat)
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1 1/2 C blueberries
Stir together starter, oil, water, egg, brown sugar and lemon zest. Combine dry ingredients and whisk together. Stir into the starter mixture until just combined. Fold in the blueberries. Spoon into greased or lined muffin cups until 2/3 full. Bake at 375 F for 30-35 minutes. *you can use frozen berries too and don’t need to thaw them. Just adjust your cooking time if necessary.
***At this point you can start feeding your starter twice a day for good growth. Add 1/3 C flour and 1/3 C water morning and night and stirring it up with your chopstick. Use a big enough container to keep ahead of your starter growth. If you’re getting somewhere, it’s going to start getting really frothy and expand upwards after feedings.
Making something with your starter every few days keeps it under control. If you don’t want to bake something and aren’t OCD like me about it, toss half of it into the bin. It’s okay. No one will die. It’s a process. You’re growing a living organism that can make bread magic. Go with it. There are some embedded recipes and more at the end that you can use until you think you’re ready for tackling bread.
When your starter is visibly frothy and nearly doubling within a few hours of feeding, get ready to tackle your bread.
Sourdough Bread
320 g of active (recently fed) starter
800 g flour
460 mL warm water
1 tsp salt
Early in the day combine the starter and water together. Stir in the salt and mix in the flour gradually until you have a good mass. You may need to add additional flour to get the dough to a good consistency. Let rest 20 minutes. Then use a bread mixer or knead by hand 15 minutes until the dough is firm and glossy and slightly sticky. I have added about 2/3 C additional flour to get the right texture. Use a dough scraper to get all dough out of the bowl or off the floured countertop. Put into a greased bowl and cover with a towel to allow to rise until doubled. This can take anywhere from 3-6 hours depending on the temperature in the house and the native yeast spores. Once doubled, remove from bowl and divide in half. Fold the dough into itself until you have a tight mass for your proofing baskets/loaf pans. If you’re using loaf pans, grease them before putting the dough into them seam side down. If you’re using proofing baskets, flour them well and make sure your dough is coated with flour too. Gently place the dough seam side up in the proofing baskets. Cover and let rise until doubled. Probably another 3 hours or so. Then preheat oven to 420 F with a cast-iron skillet on the bottom rack. Gently turn the dough out of baskets onto a parchment-lined baking sheet.
Slice the tops of the loaves deeply with a razor/sharp knife. Toss 1/2 C ice cubes into the skillet and put loaves into the oven to bake.
If you’re using loaf pans to rise, slice the tops before tossing the ice into the skillet and put them straight into the oven. Bake 35-40 minutes until your bread is nice and brown. The ice is what gives you the lift and trademark sourdough crust.
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Chocolate Sourdough Cake 350 degrees F
1 C active sourdough starter
1 C room temp milk or water
2 C whole wheat pastry flour (if you grind your own flour, just use a fine grind)
1 1/2 C sugar
2 tsp vanilla
1 tsp instant coffee or coffee substitute
1 C melted butter or vegetable oil
1 tsp salt
2 large eggs
3-18 hours before baking, mix your starter, milk/water and flour in a large bowl, cover and let rest at room temperature.
Preheat the oven to 350 F and grease a 9x13 pan. Beat together the sugar, butter/oil, vanilla, salt, baking soda, cocoa and coffee. Beat in the eggs one at a time. Gently fold into the sourdough mixture until fully incorporated and smooth textured. This will not be quite like your regular cake batter.
Scrape batter into greased pan and bake 30-40 minutes until a tester inserted into the centre comes out clean. Let cool completely before you frost this cake.
Sourdough Cornbread 375 degrees F
1 C flour
1 C starter
1 C milk
1 C cornmeal
1 tsp salt
Combine and set aside in a covered bowl 8-24 hours at room temperature.
Preheat oven to 375 F and grease an iron skillet/baking pan that you can leave to heat up in the oven.
1/4 maple syrup/honey
2 eggs
1/2 C melted butter/oil
Combine and stir into cornmeal mixture. Sprinkle baking powder and baking soda over the top of the batter and fold in. Remove hot pan/skillet from oven and spoon in batter then return to oven to bake until tester in centre comes out clean.
Cakey Chocolate Brownies 350 degrees F
3 eggs
1/3 C melted butter
1/2 C cocoa
1/4 C brown sugar
1/2 C sourdough starter
1/2 C brown sugar
1/s tsp vanilla
Pinch of salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 C flour
Preheat oven to 350 F. Combine the melted butter, cocoa and first amount of brown sugar. Stir in eggs, vanilla and second amount of brown sugar. Whisk flour, salt and baking soda together and then mix into chocolate mixture until incorporated completely. Pour into greased/parchment-lined 9” square pan and bake for 25-30 minutes. This makes a nice springy cake brownie. You can add chopped nuts to the recipe if desired. Good dusted with icing sugar for a simple quick dessert. —————
My journey began when I found a book in the house, “Local Breads - Sourdough and Wholegrain Recipes from Europe’s Best Artisan Bakers” by Daniel Leader. It covered different types of starter and regional specialties the author had encountered over several years of research. There were specialized ingredients, and day by day schedules for nursing the little blobs of glop into culinary splendour. Every so often I leafed through it and thought about accepting the challenge, but realized I would be better with pictures and hands-on instruction so off to YouTube I eventually trotted.
I didn’t realize people actually make a career out of teaching the foolish to make sourdough. About a dozen videos and one document download later, I am now being stalked by a sourdough instructor to sign up for his sourdough university. Don’t do that. But at least I felt empowered to start my own sourdough journey. And the saga began. 50 g of flour, 50 g of water and many kilos of patience.
I got sucked in by an Irish sourdough maker and watched his video several times. He tricked me into thinking it would be a delightful experience figuring out my sourdough. It was the accent more than anything, so if you want to have your own Irish baker fix, check out the first link at the bottom.
I dutifully weighed out my flour (not special flour, but just some unbleached flour from Superstore) and used previously boiled warm water diligently measured, then mixed them together with a non-metal utensil and plopped optimistically into a glass container. I religiously weighed and added and discarded according to his timetable and after about 6 days had a sourish mass of goo that I thought I could try out. We’d upgraded to a stoneware crock to deal with the expanded volume. (You don’t need a non-metal utensil. Chopsticks work well)
It was too soon. The bread smelled right - sour and bready with a nice brown crust, but woefully dense and it had a tendency to scratch your gums while eating it toasted (like a good little martyr). I could have used it as a training discus if I wanted. I tried again. I bought rattan banettons for proofing my precious loaves and found out the hard way that not only was my dough dense and immature, but it was also too sticky and wet and that I really had no idea what I was doing. I watched my little Irishman a couple more times in case I missed something. I flipped through the cookbook. Then I started watching failure videos. Search titles like “why is my bread so dense?” “How to stop my bread from sticking to the basket” were very instructive. (If you’re ever having a hard time going to sleep, slow, ponderous, badly edited YouTube videos could do the trick.) The takeaways were helpful and I stopped feeding my baby its own weight daily and instead split the feedings into two smaller feedings - one morning and one night. I also started paying attention to how thick my starter was, and eventually was only adding the water about every 2nd or third feeding. And I embraced liberal flouring of bannetons and dough while proofing so my banettons could work their magic. And finally, after not letting myself make bread again until I had a frothy masterpiece that actually overflowed it’s container one day after its breakfast, I had my starter.
I am simply impatient. I want success quickly. I needed to let my starter grow up at its own pace. No rushing sleepovers, toilet training, and walking home independently for my little baby goo. It was a tough lesson. And I hate throwing away food. I had to find a way to use up the discarded starter regularly until it was ready to become a bread starter.
There is a mindset to sourdough. Like a toddler, it can’t be rushed or forced. It requires surrendering and patience I wasn’t sure I had by about week 3. But in week 4 it came together. And I had to listen to what the starter wanted which meant transporting the rising loaves with me in the car to babysit at my daughter’s house and bake them there. That’s just how much commitment it took me. But it was an exultant baking experience to see it come together in the finished product. And this is only the beginning.
YouTube gems:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FVfJTGpXnU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWBzzfxSZsc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJEHsvW2J6M
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmb0wWKITBQ&t
Sourdough starter recipes:
https://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/collections/sourdough-discard-recipes
*many of the recipes above are adapted from what was on this site. There are other recipes too, but I haven’t tried them yet.
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