 I know I've been making a lot of sourdough videos lately but I know a lot of people are baking these days and since I've made those few videos I've gotten quite a few questions so I figured I'd take a minute here to just address them all at once. So let's get into it. If you're new here my name is Charlie and on this channel I show you how to create delicious food using simple ingredients and techniques so that you can become a more confident home cook. So let's talk sourdough starters. Of course I think you'd find it helpful to watch the entire video but I will leave timestamps in the description below if you're looking for the answers to specific questions. So let's get started. Question number one is why do you use whole wheat flour and is it absolutely necessary? AKA can you make a starter without whole wheat flour? And the short answer is no. Whole wheat flour is not 100% necessary but it definitely does help. As I'm sure you're aware whole wheat flour contains the entire grain wherein white flour that grain is stripped off so the whole wheat flour contains a lot more nutrition which helps the yeast and bacteria to survive. So personally I would recommend at least starting out with whole wheat flour as your starter is getting up and running and then you can gradually transition to white flowers if you prefer once your starter is active. The important thing to remember though if you are using white flour is that you need to use unbleached flour because that bleaching process can get rid of a lot of the natural yeast and bacteria that live on the yeast and help your starter to thrive. I'm actually doing a little experiment back here to test out different types of flowers and how they affect a starter so be sure to keep an eye out for that video coming pretty soon. Question number two is do you need to keep your starter at a specific temperature and what if your room temperature varies throughout the day? So no you don't need to keep your starter at a specific temperature but you do need to become familiar with how your starter behaves in your particular environment. So whether your room is 60 degrees or 80 degrees is going to make a pretty big difference in how quickly your starter rises and falls but both of them will definitely work. In the 60 degree environment you may need to maintain a higher percentage of your starter each day because it's going to rise and fall slower in that colder environment so keeping a higher percentage of your starter will speed up the activity a little bit. Now if your room temperature varies throughout the day that does make it a little bit more difficult but just try to become familiar with generally how quickly your starter rises and falls and assuming the swings and temperature are relatively consistent from day to day you should be just fine. Really you're just looking to make sure that your starter rises and falls in a predictable and consistent way. Once you have an active starter they are actually surprisingly resilient so I wouldn't worry too much about the swings and temperature. Just try to stay consistent with your feeding and use a ratio that allows it to rise and fall within about 24 hours each day. Now question number three what do I do if a liquid forms on top of my starter? So that liquid is known as Hooch and it's just an alcohol that forms on top of the starter as it develops and it's perfectly normal but it does mean that it's time for your starter to be fed. So it usually happens more often within the first few days of getting your starter going but it definitely doesn't mean that you need to get rid of your starter that you did anything wrong. Just go ahead and mix it in and continue to feed your starter as you normally would. Now question number four should I feed my starter every 24 hours or should I try to feed it right when it starts to fall? So technically the best time to feed is when your starter has risen to its maximum height and is just starting to fall but you don't really need to worry about that just feed it every 24 hours and it'll be just fine. With that in mind though you do want to try to get your starter to rise and fall in about 24 hours or as close to it as possible. So for example if your starter is completing its rise and fall cycle within only 12 hours you want to try to use a lower inoculation or in other words maintaining less of your mature starter each day to try to slow down that rise and fall. So for me I keep 25 grams of my starter each day and then feed it with 100 grams of flour and 100 grams of water so that's a 1 to 4 to 4 ratio. And that works perfectly fine for me but you may need to adjust that ratio depending on your particular environment. Like I said those starters are pretty resilient so most people will be perfectly fine just feeding with that 1 to 4 to 4 ratio every 24 hours. Now let's move on to question number six. I followed all of the instructions but my starter still isn't active. What do I do? Well it depends where you're at in the process so if it's only been about a week or two and you're seeing at least some signs of activity I would just continue to feed it as you have been and it should eventually strengthen and become more active. Now if it's been two weeks or more and you're still not really seeing any signs of activity at that point something probably went wrong and you may need to just start over trying with a different type of flour or water. So assuming you're using unbleached or whole wheat flour as I've recommended that's probably not the issue so I would start with checking on your water. If you're using tap water it's possible that it contains high concentrations of chlorine or other treatment chemicals that are killing off your yeast and bacteria. So I'd try switching to filtered water and see if that makes a difference. Keep in mind though tap water should work perfectly fine for most people but it does vary from place to place depending on where you live so it's definitely worth giving filtered water a shot if your starter doesn't seem to be working out. So now question number seven. My starter is either too sour or not sour enough. What do I do? So there's basically two main ways that you can manipulate how acidic your starter is and the first is going to be the temperature that you keep it at. So generally the cooler temperature you store it at the more sour it's going to be because if you remember the starter contains both bacteria and yeast so the yeast is what provides the rise and the bacteria is what provides that sour flavor. So at lower temperatures the yeast activity slows down while that acid producing bacteria remains pretty active so the starter develops a more sour flavor whereas at a higher temperature the yeast will be very active so the starter will rise very quickly before the bacteria really has much time to produce that acid. Now the second factor that affects how sour your starter is is the inoculation percentage so again that's how much starter that you keep each time you feed it so the higher your inoculation percentage the more sour your starter will generally be and of course as you're making bread and working with your actual dough the same principles apply so if you want a more sour loaf you can either use more levan or you can perform your bulk rise or your final rise or both at a lower temperature. Now question number eight which I've gotten quite a bit is what do I do if my starter doesn't pass the float test? So a lot of people put a big emphasis on the float test and while it can be a good indication that your starter is ready to bake with in my experience it's not 100% necessary as long as your starter at least doubles in size and rises and falls consistently it should be fine to bake with. I've baked plenty of successful loaves without my levan passing the float test and to be honest I don't really even bother with it anymore instead I just go based on how much my starter has risen. As you get more experience you'll just be able to tell whether your levan is ready or not. Now the last question is do I have to discard my excess starter? And the answer is yes you do have to remove your excess starter each time you feed it to prevent it from getting larger and larger each time but that doesn't mean you have to get rid of it. Obviously you can bake bread with it but there's a lot other things you can do too. I mean pretty much any baked good that can be made with yeast can also be made with a sourdough starter so you can make pancakes, waffles, bagels, flatbread really anything you can think of. So I hope this video helped y'all and if you want to see my full sourdough playlist which walks you through how to create a successful loaf from start to finish be sure to click that playlist on the bottom right corner of the screen. So there you go I'll see you all in the next one.