Finally received my live starter in the mail and fed him his first meal at lunch time. Meet Lewys :) He appears to be responding very well to his first feeding.
Any hints or tips I might need for my first attempt at a sourdough loaf this weekend?
People sell starter? That business must have an amazing margin.
Yeah, you can buy it either dried or live. A small jar, and two ounces of starter, plus labels and shipping and handling so the cost isn’t all too much.
Sourdough is always responsive to local conditions in your kitchen and dough hydration right at that moment so just be prepared to experiment. I think the best advice to making sourdough is just to make it, adjust it, and make it again.
My best advice is to take a bit of the starter and freeze it. Because at some point, you’ll become overwhelmed with sourdough, or you’ll fall behind in the care and feeding department. And there’s no telling ahead of time when that’s going to happen. But you can freeze and re-start the starter! So I just periodically freeze a bit of starter so I can avoid having to start from scratch and get right to that deeper more complex flavor when I start up again.
Had sourdough starter for years and never had this problem. Its incredibly forgiving on feeding schedules, unlike my cat who will sit on my desk and paw at me if I haven’t fed him by 15:30, his dinner time is 17:00. If I am making sourdough frequently it lives at room temperature and is fed daily but if I forget a day it doesn’t matter, if I am not going to be making much it lives in the fridge and is fed about once a week or so.
Tbh wasn’t aware people bought starter until reading this post, I have always made my own. Suppose if you are very irregular in using it then freezer might be a good idea, we have at the very least sourdough pizza pretty much every week so there is a baseline minimum amount I will use and I can feed it to keep in line with that. My starter lives in a 500ml jar and I just scoop out how ever much seems reasonable for making something, I don’t really measure anything when cooking, just go by eye/feel. If the dough ends up a bit bigger than last time isn’t a problem. Rotate jars occasionally to give the old one a clean.
I live alone, so there are times when I get sick of sourdough, and there are times when I get overwhelmed with life and forget to take care of it. Periodically putting a bit of starter in the freezer means I don’t have to start over from scratch.
When I lived alone I turned excess into pasta and let it dry out to store it until I wanted to have the pasta. Actually having pasta for dinner tonight, might make fresh sourdough pasta instead of using plain shop bought pasta.
FYI: you can also make a large badge, dry it and rehydrate it when needed. Never goes bad and you don’t have to feed it on a weekly basis
Wow, that’s great advice! Thank you! I’ll put some in the original container and freeze it then.
At what point would you suggest I take a portion? From discard would it be better to feed it before putting it to sleep?
I usually feed it then freeze a bit (if I’m going to freeze any). But that’s mostly because I’ll be in the kitchen feeding it anyway when it randomly occurs to me that I haven’t backed it up recently so I’ll just do it then.
It’s a boy?!
Yeah 😅
I showed the package to my friend and the artwork had a windmill in the background, but the sails were very faint, so all he saw was an oddly placed phallic object 😂.
that makes perfect sense. very nice!
And mine just died. RIP
