No Waste, 2 ingredient Sourdough Starter Recipe | 7-Day Step by Step (2024)

FAQs

How to make sourdough starter without waste? ›

Once your starter is established, keep the lid firmly shut tight, if using a Weck jar add the clips only, and store it in the fridge between uses. This puts your starter to sleep whilst you do not need it. From this point you no longer need to keep discarding and feeding, when you're going to use it, feed it to use.

How to increase a starter. If your recipe calls for more than 227g (about 1 cup) of starter, feed it without discarding until you've reached the amount you need (plus 113g to keep and feed again).

To make sourdough starter, all you need is flour and water, a digital scale, a jar, and about 5 minutes a day for up to a week. The result is a healthy home-baked loaf that's more complex, delicious, and less expensive than one you grab off the grocer's shelf.

Over the years, I've found keeping the mixture warm at around 80°F (26°C), and high hydration (100% water to flour in baker's percentages) helps get things started. In addition, while not mandatory, using certain flour also helps increase the chances a starter will take hold quickly (see below).

Typical feeding ratios are 1:2:2 or 1:3:3 (old sourdough: fresh flour: water). However, even extreme ratios like 1:50:50 would still work. In that case, the freshly fed sourdough would just require more or much more time to grow and reach its peak, as judged by the maximum volume increase in the jar (at least doubled).

The best flour blend for creating a new sourdough starter is 50% whole-meal flour (whole wheat or whole rye) and 50% bread flour or all-purpose flour. I recommend a 50/50 mix of whole wheat flour and bread flour. Why do you need to use these two types of flour?

Absolutely you can! Active starter can be used in the same way as sourdough discard in sweet or savory baking. You can add active sourdough starter to any recipe you would add discard to following the same calculation.

Remember, you can't use the discard from your homemade sourdough starter for the first 7 days. You can use sourdough discard in all kinds of sourdough discard recipes, including these no wait sourdough recipes, overnight sourdough discard recipes and sourdough discard recipes that use up a lot of discard.

You can feed your starter a different ratio if you want to. Feed your starter 1:2:1 which means you'd feed it twice as much flour as water. This 1:2:1 ration can be handy if you are trying to strengthen your sourdough starter. It will decrease the hydration though, so it's often something you just do for a few days.

Compared to whole wheat flour, rye flour is said to be the most nutrient- and amylase-dense option for a sourdough starter. Overall, it has a lower gluten protein content than wheat flour, which means it produces slack, sticky, and dense doughs.

Is it cheaper to make your own sourdough? ›

Yes that's right, it's actually cheaper to purchase a ready made sourdough starter than spend money on flour to establish a wild yeast colony yourself.

A 1:2:2 feeding ratio would consist of one part existing starter, two parts flour and two parts water. For example, if you have 30g of existing starter, you would feed it 60g of flour and 60g of flour. The most common feeding ratios for daily maintenance are 1:1:1 or 1:2:2.

Most commonly, the issue here has to do with temperature (which is very important). If your sourdough starter is kept at a low temp, even 70°F (21°C), it will slow fermentation activity and appear to be sluggish, taking longer to rise and progress through the typical signs of fermentation. The solution: keep it warm.

By creating a sourdough starter, you are nurturing a colony of bacteria. Those bacteria have an ideal temperature to thrive in – that's between 20 and 24 Centrigrade, 70 and 75 Farenheit. The closer you can keep your sourdough starter to this temperature, the quicker and easier building it up will be.

Flour with more protein and nutrients make sourdough starter more active, so consider feeding your starter with bread flour, whole wheat flour, rye flour (or a combination of these) to increase fermentation activity and rise. Thicken the starter (lower hydration ratio).

A 100% hydration sourdough starter is a culture which is kept and fed with water and flour at equal weights. Like for instance 5 oz water to 5 oz flour. A 166% hydration starter is fed with equal volume of flour and water, which most typically is one cup of water (8.3 oz) and one cup of flour (5 oz).

Despite all the mysticism and lore about creating the concoction, a sourdough starter is merely a naturally fermenting mixture of flour and water. Add water to dry flour, let it sit on the counter for a few days, and you'll see nature weave life into a once lifeless lump: bubbles will appear and the mixture will rise.

A starter stored in the fridge can be fed once a week. If you plan to use it often, you can store it for up to two months without feeding. When you want to use the starter again, remove it from the fridge for a few hours, then feed it every 12 hours for 36 hours before you make bread with it.

It's really quite simple to keep a sourdough starter alive. Just feed it, use it, and keep it in the fridge when you aren't!