Sourdough starter, making it the easy way!

There is nothing quite like the smell of freshly cooked sourdough, If you’re a sourdough veteran you’ll be surprised to hear that many people are put off from baking bread thinking its a tedious, messy affair.  If you want to see what you’re missing out on, stick around for this sourdough series where we will be covering, making the starter, lovingly looking after it and making some amazingly delicious  breads!

I did have a sourdough starter many moons ago must be ten at least, when I first moved out and fell in love with cooking and baking. Looking back I can’t remember what happened to it. No doubt I went away for a while as I travelled a lot at that age and it didn’t make it, or was secretly discarded when I was away.

What you need

We use this term loosely as  anything  that can keep the  sourdough starter in it will do, if it has a lid even better if not one can be improvised easily enough

• A container
• Flour
• Water
• Scales
• Measuring jug

The container

Before I get to the nitty-gritty of mixing up the sough dough I thought I’d show you the container I’ve settled on, it a 1.5l glass flip top jar that has had the seal removed.
Please do bear in mind if you plan to make this avoid any airtight containers as the CO2 released could build up to a dangerous level and cause a catastrophe, and I’d hate to see anyone get hurt or have to clean up the mess at best!

Measuring out the flour

For this starter were going to go with a 50/50 mix by weight of flour to water, 400g strong bread flour ( as that is what I had) to 400ml of water

Any flour will do, but I find the results are better if you use a whole grain or organic flours. One thing to keep in mind you can make as much or as little of the starter as you want but when using it to make a bread mix you’ll need between 150g and 300g of this mix to make a good-sized loaf

Why did I choose to use a funnel 😣 Top tip don’t use a funnel to get the flour in the container unless its one of those fancy wide-mouthed ones used for Jam’s etc

Adding the water to the mix

Once the flour has been added its onto the water, this was added at a 50/50 ratio to  weight as mentioned above

Make sure to give it a good thorough stir to make sure the water and flour had mixed together without too many big lumps

Next step is to let the wild yeast start to take hold and feed it over the coming days with more flour until we have a nice strong yeast culture that we can harvest to make a leaven which will be added to the bread mix to make it taste amazing!!!!

I’ll keep you posted on the feeding and ultimately the first “baking of the bread” once the starter is good to go
I can’t stress how much I’m looking forward to sharing my home baked bread with you!

Thanks for taking the time to read the post,  and don’t be afraid to get in touch below

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Sourdough part 2 up next