Ingredients You Need

We are going to build a sourdough starter from scratch. The more you feed a starter, the more active it will be.

We’re going to feed your starter once a day over the course of 7-14 days —but you can speed up the process if you feed your starter 2x or even 3x a day.

A a general rule of thumb, the more you feed it, the more mature it gets.

In other words, the longer you wait to use it to bake sourdough bread, the better your sourdough bread will be.

So buy enough flour. A 1lb bag should be more than enough to feed your starter this week.

ATTENTION:

You can use any type of flour you want to make sourdough starter. They just have different characteristics.

I’ll walk you through the different types of flour below…

• Now let’s talk about flour

  General Rules of Thumb

  White / Light

  • means commercially sifted flour, 
  • extracted to get most of the bran out of the flour
  • less protein than whole
  • Less bran = you need add less water
  • Less bran = gives you more ovenspring
  • Less bran = gives you lighter, bigger, fluffier bread
  • Gives you white bread

  Whole / Dark

  • Still sifted but not as much as white, 
  • Bran left in the flour, gritty
  • More protein than white
  • Bran = you need to add more water
  • Bran = gives you less ovenspring
  • Bran = gives you more dense bread, a meal within a slice
  • Gives you brown bread

  Different Flours and what it means

  White Bread Flour

  • Gold standard in bread baking
  • Gives you a really beautiful sourdough bread with a great ovenspring, great ear, great belly
  • It’s got high protein, high gluten and no bran to cut the gluten down
  • Hydration is capped at around 72%
  • But you can force it to accept more water through autolyse and bassinage

  Whole Wheat Flour

  • The “whole” version of ANY wheat flour
  • Any flour that is not sifted, contains the bran of that flour
  • Whole wheat sourdough needs to be high hydration
  • At the minimum, 84% hydration

  Attention:  

  • To check what type of whole wheat flour you have, see the ingredients list.  
  • HARD/WINTER wheat = high gluten (bread flour) and 
  • SOFT/SPRING wheat = low gluten (AP flour)

  All Purpose Flour

  • Low gluten flour = less water
  • Made for cookies, cakes, pies, muffins —anything that doesn’t need to be chewy
  • Can still make bread, but will be cake-like instead of bread-like, meaning
  • It gives you bread that is less chewy, more soft like cake

  Ancient Grain Flour

  • Flours like Einkorn, Spelt, Rye, Kamut, etc.
  • They’re very nutritious and tasty 
  • —but have LOW GLUTEN content and HIGH fiber
  • It will NOT behave like white bread flour
  • FLAVORFUL, but much, much denser
  • Will not have a great ovenspring unless you cut it with AP or Bread flour and/or
  • Add sweeteners to aid in taste and speeding up fermentation

  Home Milled / Fresh Milled Flour

  • Behaves like whole wheat flour –but even denser because even the whole wheat flour you find at stores is sifted a little
  • even if you sift it yourself at home, you will never, NEVER be able to extract all of the bran
  • I have tried with a medical-laboratory-grade mesh sieve of 180 microns and it is so tedious and impossible, it’s not worth the money and effort to do this
  • ALL Sourdough bread made with Fresh milled flour will ALWAYS behave like whole wheat
  • Needs to be high hydration (min 88%)
  • Faster fermentation because of the high hydration