A freshly baked loaf of bread is hard to beat, particularly the sourdough kind. Sourdough has a distinctive, slightly tangy, and complex flavour profile due to the fermentation process, which comes from a naturally fermented starter containing yeast and bacteria. You won’t find this yeast in regular bread or readily available in supermarkets, but you can easily make it at home, says Elaine Boddy.
The sourdough expert, baker, and cookbook author told Express.co.uk: “When it comes to making sourdough, it all begins with your starter. Starters can seem like mythical beings when they’re much simpler to work with than we’ve been previously led to believe.” A sourdough starter is made by fermenting flour and water.
Elaine explained: “Once made, it lives in the fridge until you want to make dough at which point you feed it with flour and water to generate more and give you the amount you need to make your recipe.”
In her sourdough guide, the bread expert suggests aiming for the starter to grow after feeding for three days in a row before using it to make bread around day seven.
The starter recipe is simple: mix 50ml of water with 50g of strong white bread flour. Elaine recommends Matthews Cotswold Flour, Churchill’s white flour, but you can also use strong wholemeal or wholewheat flour or any ancient grains flour in the same quantity.
How to make sourdough starter
Equipment
- Lidded glass bowl, like the Weck 744 580ml tulip jar, without the seal
- 50g strong white bread flour (plus extra for feeding)
- 50ml tap water
- Stainless steel spoon and fork
Day one
Combine the water and flour in a bowl, stir well, scrape down the sides of the bowl and mix it all in using a stainless steel spoon or fork. It should be nicely thick by this point, when you can loosely cover it, allowing gases to escape. Leave the bowl on the kitchen counter overnight.
Day two
On day two, add 30g of flour and 30ml of water. Scrape down the sides of the bowl and mix it all in, then loosely cover and leave on the counter.
Day three
Add 30ml of water and 30g of flour to the mixture and stir well, scraping down the sides of the bowl to combine everything. Cover the bowl loosely again and leave it on the counter overnight.
Day four
Elaine instructs that the starter may look bubbly at this point, but it is not ready to use. Instead, you should discard half of the contents to keep the starter “lean”. Once discarded, add 30g of flour and 30ml water, scrape and stir and leave loosely covered again.
Day five
Repeat the feeding process with 30g of each ingredient, stir, scrape and cover.
Day six
Discard half the contents of the bowl, then feed again.
Day seven
Repeat the feeding process with 30g of each ingredient, stirring, scraping, and covering. Elaine notes that if your starter grows again in the same way by the next day, it’s ready to use.
Look for a “thick and glutinous” consistency. Once it has been fed and bubbly, the bubbles should be all the way through the liquid. “If you are not sure, keep doing the same discarding and feeding schedule for up to 14 days, by which time it should be ready to use”, instructs Elaine.
When growing starter for sourdough bread, Elaine notes that “a really key thing to keep in mind is that the fridge is your friend”.
When you’re not using your starter, store it in the fridge where it will “go to sleep” until you want to use it next.
The same goes for cases where your starter is growing very quickly in hot weather; put it in the fridge to slow down the activity.
If you’re going on holiday, Elaine says you can put your starter in the fridge and leave it alone. It will go to sleep until you get back.
To finish the bread, Elaine’s full sourdough recipe calls for:
Ingredients
- 50g starter (or less)
- 500g strong white bread flour, preferably Matthews Cotswold Flour, Churchill’s white flour
- 350g water
- 1tsp salt