 So, a sourdough starter is basically flour and water mixed together, lactic acid and other good bacteria develop and take over and make that tangy taste that we expect out of sourdough. That's the lactic acid, it's the same tanginess that you get out of yogurt. And the way that you start a sourdough starter is by mixing whole wheat flour or rye flour and water in equal proportions. And so really it's just a half a cup of flour, you can also do it by weight, but weight or volume doesn't matter really. So a half a cup of flour, that's whole wheat or rye flour doesn't matter. Try not to use white, white doesn't have full nutrient profile that rye or wheat does and it's going to take a lot longer to start. And then you put in a half a cup of water into a glass or plastic container and you just mix it until it's completely combined. Using a plastic spatula, just mix, mix, mix, now it's completely combined and it just looks like kind of a runny, a runny dough, nothing special. Take down the sides of the jar, you can use a mason jar or whatever and then cover it mostly to keep things out of it, but this cover, this one has a crack in it, if it didn't I would leave one end of it popped up so that CO2 which is going to be produced can be released and then I let that sit until tomorrow. Okay now it's the next day and basically what has happened is this will start to potentially already smell and bubble and start to ferment. Now what you're hoping for is lactic acid starting to take this over. It should smell a little sharp, don't taste it at this point. And what you're going to do is there's some bubbles and a few other things, that means it's working and don't worry if there's not bubbles, you can still take this process and do exactly what I'm doing. So 24 hours later I'm going to go to the sink and I'm going to dump half of this out. Alright so now I'm down to a quarter cup flour and a quarter cup water from yesterday remaining and so I add a quarter cup flour and a quarter cup water and I mix them all together. This is known as feeding the sourdough starter. This is something I'm going to do for the rest of this sourdough starter's existence. Every time I want to use it the day before I put in one portion water, one portion flour and I mix it up. If I'm going to need a lot of starter for the next day I can add a cup of flour and a cup of water to only a quarter sourdough starter and it will inoculate or spread the lactic producing bacteria and other microorganisms that make sourdough what it is. But while I'm raising the sourdough starter I just mix that and I let it sit and I let it sit for another day and I do the same thing and I do this for probably anywhere from a week to three weeks and it might smell bad at day five or six or around that area it might kind of smell like it's gone bad unless you have green, black, not even black, green or red mold or white like mold with fuzzy sorts of bits on it that's what you want to worry about. If you see that you're going to have to start over however if it gets a little bit of gray on the water on top that's fine as long as it doesn't have that bacterial kind of mold growth you're fine. It's going to smell bad before it smells good so it might take two weeks or even three weeks before you start to get that real good sourdough smell and you just have to know from the smell it will go from oh that's off that's bad to oh that's good and you'll know once it's good and each day you'll get to watch it the bubbles will cause it to rise up and then it will fall back down and so I will keep doing this until I start to get to a usable sourdough starter that we can't use this for bread and it seems like a waste of flour but this is how you build up a sourdough starter. The alternative is to find a friend who has a sourdough starter and they'll give you an already running starter which is a lot easier and quicker but if you need to start from scratch this is how you do it. Okay now it's now after you know two or three weeks once I start getting a consistent good sourdough smell coming on my starter every day after I feed it what I want to do now is feed it so that I can bake with it. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to add a half a cup because I already have probably a cup worth of sourdough starter there and most of the time when I'm cooking bread I'll use between a quarter cup and a cup of sourdough starter per loaf and that depends on a couple of things what type of bread am I making if it's a really light airy white French or potato bread I might not need to use as much sourdough starter because that bread is not very dense and a little bit of starter can push it up into the shape it needs to be on the other hand if I'm making a really dense multi grain bread I might use a little more sourdough starter so that it has a little more oomph to get it going. So density of the bread that you're making is one reason to decide how much to put it on the other hand if I needed to go faster I'll put in a cup of sourdough starter if I want it to go slower I'll put in a quarter cup also so you can decide alright I have a really dense bread that I need to go slowly I can put in you know just maybe a half a cup if I have a really light dough and I need it to go fast I can put in a cup and it will go really fast or a quarter cup and it will go really slow and now why would you want it to raise slower or faster well the slower bread raises the more flavor it has if you want a really strong sourdough flavor you have to let it rise overnight 18 hours or even 24 hours so putting in a quarter cup will give it less initial yeast and sourdough bacteria and so it will multiply more slowly and take longer to build up the amount of head of steam that it needs the carbon dioxide that it needs to raise the bread but sometimes you know life happens and we need a loaf of bread soon so I'll throw in a cup of yeast and or a cup of sourdough starter now the thing to remember with sourdough starter is you need to put it into the dough when it's at its most active so right now this is exhausted sourdough starter so it's been you know I fed it yesterday so now what I'm going to do is I'm going to add a half cup of water and a half cup of flour I already have a mixed up here so I'll just add them right in usually what I like to do so I like to add a cup of water or I like to add my water first and mix it up with the sourdough starter so that it becomes really runny and then add the flour rather than adding the flour first and then the water and then mixing it all together I feel like I don't get as good of a mix I do the same thing when I'm adding my sourdough starter to the bread but I will make a I will add that in the video later I'll show you how to use this properly alright so now now I've got my old sourdough fed just like I have been doing to develop my sourdough I fed it and I wait for it to bubble and once it hits maximum bubble it's called active that's the active phase rather than the reducing or dormant phase of the sourdough life cycle so now it's a little runny but that's okay some people like their sourdough starter runnier some people like it thicker it's up to you experiment if you like it thicker add more flour you know maybe three quarters of a cup of flour one half cup water for example if you like it runnier one to one is pretty good I wonder one is what you're reading all the books that seems to be the standards alright now I'm gonna let this go but I'm not gonna wait 24 hours usually I would wait another 24 hours and feed this but because I'm gonna use it I've made it a little bigger than usual and I'm kind of breaking one of the cardinal rules you want your container to be twice as large as your dough when it's inactive so when it's doesn't have a whole bunch of bubbles in it because a lot of times this will more than double in volume so I want to have at least twice as much room for expansion as what I have here so right now you know ideally I only have a third of this full so that it had plenty of room to rise and then subside without overflowing the tops so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna cap this like this and I'm gonna have to keep an eye on it so I'll be home today so I can come back and forth and check it but as it rises up once it gets to here I'm gonna have to use my spatula and give it a stir to release some of that CO2 it won't hurt anything it won't reduce the strength or vigorousness of my sourdough starter but it will it will keep it from overflowing otherwise put a pan under it because you're gonna get overflow and that's all over your counter and it dries and you have to scrape it off and it's a huge mess so don't feel more than a third definitely under a half so I'm breaking the rules so I'll have to deal with that but it's not that big of a deal just if you want to avoid a mess make sure you keep your sourdough starter on the lower half of your container so now I'm gonna let this sit out on the countertop and get all bubbly and then we'll come back to it and when I'm ready to use the yeast I'll stir it up to get all the air bubbles out if I'm gonna measure it what I actually like to do is use a scale because that's more accurate and so generally the rule of thumb is for every tablespoon of granular yeast that you're replacing you use a cup of sourdough starter now you have to also subtract a half a cup of water and half a cup of flour or four ounces of each from the recipe because remember the sourdough starter has a lot more in it than just a little tablespoon of yeast you can also reduce that remember if you want the sharper sourdough flavor what I like to do is first pour in my water I like to measure by weight but you can measure it by a cup and then pour in my sourdough starter and mix it around a lot and that disperses the sourdough creating yeasts and bacteria and other organisms so that when you add the flour to this mixture and the salt and whatever else you're adding it's already spread out enough you don't have to wait for it to bubble like you do with yeast it's ready to go as long as you're using active sourdough starter and then once you're done with that I you can feed it and toss it in the fridge until you're ready to make your next loaf of bread or at least the next week feed it if you keep it in the refrigerator feed it at least once a week it's gonna separate out and there'll be a little water on top don't worry about that mix it right back in it might be a little gray it doesn't matter you can mix it right back in feed it once a week you don't have to just make bread with it you can do things like throw it into your pancake batter or your pizza dough or whatever even if you're gonna use regular yeast you can use the sourdough as well now I'm gonna do is just in case I can't freeze it for three months or I can't feed it every week I'm gonna be gone for a while I'm going to dry some of it and you take about a quarter to a half a cup spread it out on a parchment paper let it dry crumble it up and put it in an airtight container and that will keep for up to a year and all you have to do to reconstitute it is add water and mix it around and you'll probably have to feed it for a day or two that's a lot about starting out with sourdough there's a lot more to learn we have workshops and we'll be doing some bread workshops this summer check out our website lowtechinstitute.org for more information and to find out more about the low tech Institute see our classes check out our podcast and our other videos oh and don't forget to subscribe thanks for watching