How I sorta accidentally made a sourdough starter
I’ve had sourdough starters for years, given to me by others, or bought commercially, but in every case I’ve had a terrible time maintaining it, eventually killing it within a few years.
But this time it’s different! I’ve kept this thing alive for about a year now, and it’s thriving, everyone is enjoying the breads, and I’m basically living my sourdough dream.
All with a starter I made accidentally.
You see I saw this at the supermarket.
Now it’s not meant to be a starter, it’s supposed to be a single use product where you can have fast rise bread with the taste of sourdough.
The problem was that it was such an active riser and made such a large batch of dough that I had too much, so I saved some of it in a tupperware in my fridge for later. Which I forgot about for about a week.
When I finally remembered it had shrunken down and wasn’t really enough dough for a loaf. I figured why not just add some more flour and water and let it rise again? The internet told me that wouldn’t work, but that made no sense to me based on the science of how yeast works. In fact the internet told me I had to add more yeast to get it to rise.
Stupid, I thought. I know better than the internet, I thought. And did not add any additional yeast.
It took far longer than a rise with active dry yeast, but it rose just fine.
At this point I remembered how, during my previous sourdough adventures, several people had told me about the old dough method that their grandmas etc used to use. (which is basically, break off a piece of dough, save it in the fridge, and use it as the starter for the next batch) I had not paid attention at the time, because that was not how all my books and such told me to do it. They were full of information about feedings and discards and hydration levels and not ever using a starter straight from the refrigerator.
But hadn’t I just used an old dough starter, more or less? And hadn’t it worked perfectly well?
Why not see if I could do it again?
So I saved a piece from my new batch, and a few days later mixed it up with some flour, water and salt and once again was rewarded with bread. This time the rise took about 12 hours, and the bread was tasting increasingly like sourdough.
Like a lightbulb over my head I knew. I had stumbled upon the most lazy ass method of sourdough baking around. There was a reason why everyones grandma did it this way! Because it’s so low stress! No worrying about daily feedings and rising at the correct temperatures and pouring endless amounts of water and flour slop down the drain. You just save a piece of dough, stick it in the fridge and forget about it until you want to bake another loaf.
And I have continued on this stress free path to sourdough baking ever since with my piece of old dough happily enduring all sorts of accidents, from accidental additions of enrichment's like barley malt and butter, to almost being baked. It comes through all of it like a champ.
And all of this with an oven that barely worked.
Bonus? My stomach which gives me all sorts of issues when I eat wheat doesn’t seem to mind this bread.
Also it’s delicious.
anyway, if sourdough baking has seemed too challenging in the past, you might want to give this method a go.
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Goofed around and threw together the garlic and green onion sourdough loaf... I didn't measure any of the garlic or onions, but WOW it turned out amazing. We made pesto grilled cheese for lunch and it was so yummy that Rose asked if we could have it again for dinner.
Really proud of how consistently I've been working through the goal list.
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Sourdough Discard Chocolate Chip Cookies
I’ve been making sourdough bread for about six months and have mastered a few of the discard recipes like banana muffins, waffles, English muffins and crackers. If you aren’t sure what I am talking about the “discard” is the stuff you would throw away when feeding your starter—I keep mine in a jar in the fridge so when I get the push to bake something, I have extra for some fun recipes.
I am a…
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This is a screenshot from an hour-long YouTube video on sourdough starter maintenance.
If you like bread, science, and long in-depth videos on niche topics, may I suggest checking out The Sourdough Journey?
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