How To Make A Sweet Stiff Sourdough Starter

Ingredients / Starter Composition

When you want to leaven something you really don’t want to be sour (like, let’s say, burger buns or croissants), you need to transform for regular starter it into a sweet starter.

Most of you are using a liquid starter –which is a starter that’s fed equal parts flour and water.

A sweet stiff starter is something different –you use less water to flour and add sugar as well.

This has many benefits, bigger ovenspring, longer fermentation –but really, we use a Sweet stiff sourdough starter because it results in a sourdough bread that isn’t sour.

Let’s make a Sweet Stiff Sourdough Starter

Let’s use a starter feeding ratio that has the minimal amount of sugar. Once you get the hang of this, you can increase your sugar ratio if you want. The more sugar you add, the stickier and tackier your stiff starter will be

REMEMBER:

With baker’s percentages, we are not comparing the ingredients in relation to each other, we are comparing it to the FLOUR!!!

How To Make The Sweet Stiff Starter

Simply combine all the ingredients and wait for it to triple in size. This takes 8-12hrs for me at 77F –longer if you are feeding a very small amount of starter.

A totally different kind of gluten-network

👀 Wow, just look at the gluten-network of this sweet stiff starter.

It’s totally different from the sourdough starter you would normally use to leaven an artisanal sourdough bread.

The gluten network of a sweet stiff sourdough starter looks exactly like the gluten network of an enriched dough. Because, that’s exactly what it is.

Take a moment and think with me here…

Your dough is essentially one gigantic sourdough starter. When you make a sourdough dough –what do you do? You mix the ingredients together to make the dough right?

Well another way to think about it is, that you are taking those dough ingredients and feeding the sourdough starter with it.

And so your dough is really one gigantic feeding.

And when you think about it that way, that the sourdough dough IS a sourdough starter, then it’s easy to think that, duh, the starter has the same gluten network as the dough.

In this case, the sweet stiff starter is so webby, so sticky, JUST LIKE an enriched dough (ie. sourdough brioche)

Normal Sourdough Dough

Flour, Water, Salt

Enriched Sourdough Dough

Flour, Water, Salt PLUS

• Fats (eggs, milk, butter, yogurt, oil, etc.), and
• Sugars (sugar, honey, syrup, juice, etc.)

This is the gluten network that makes brioche so fluffy and pillowy.

It’s so webby and sticky and cool to play with.

Kind of a hassle to scrape out.

Best to work with wet hands and wet tools.

How to use a Sweet Stiff Sourdough Starter in recipes

Generally, we use a Sweet Stiff Sourdough Starter for enriched doughs

But you can use a Sweet Stiff Starter in ANY sourdough bread recipe,

You can swap the regular sourdough starter and use your sweet stiff starter instead.

Why would you want to do it?

IF you really didn’t want that bread to be sour, you’d use a sweet stiff starter.

However much regular starter that bread recipe calls for, you would need to use the same amount of sweet stiff starter

Important:

Since we are using a STIFF starter, the fermentation time will be different. Pay attention to your dough. Here are some recommended readings that talk more about that…

How to really master baking sourdough bread

Why Are Flour Type and Hydration Ratios Important? And What Does It Mean For Your Sourdough Bread?