🗂️Keep in Mind A Guide to Troubleshooting Your Sourdough Starter

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Don’t panic, you've haven't woken up back in 2020, at the heights of pandemic-era bread-making panic. Believe it or not, you can bake sourdough bread at home without existential dread hanging over your head. Quite the opposite: Once you get the hang of it, sourdough bread baking is fun and rewarding, and regardless of what the homemade-bread-haters say, it actually does taste better than the store-bought stuff.

Maybe you noticed I didn't say it is easy.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of variables for something made of so few ingredients, especially when you’re starting completely from scratch. This guide can help you troubleshoot what is potentially the hardest part of sourdough bread making: the natural yeast starter. Whether you’re taking your first crack at it, or you’ve already made a few too-dense loaves and you can’t understand what went wrong, let me help you.

The biggest challenge making sourdough bread​

There is an even more extensive world beyond sourdough in bread making, including types of flours, yeasts, and preferments. Even though making a starter seems like the first hurdle, it's the trickiest one of all.

Unlike with manufactured yeast, a natural yeast starter takes time to become active. Active yeast means lots of gas bubbles, and these bubbles are what makes your bread tall and spongy. The fermentation period is where your yeast strengthens in gas production and develops that delicious tangy flavor. Oh, and you have to figure out how to catch your own invisible yeast. You can see why the biggest challenge with a sourdough bread is getting it started.

Sometimes, the only answer is patience. But other times something has just gone wrong. Here are the cues I look for when making a starter, and possible answers to problems you may encounter when doing the same.

Making a strong sourdough starter​

Wild sourdough starter is made from flour, water, and wild-caught yeast. What is wild yeast exactly? Yeast that refuses to be tamed\. It turns out, just like bacteria exist on everything, there are also yeast spores floating around everywhere. You just have to catch some in a mishmash of water and flour. On paper, this is pretty simple—I have a recipe that seems easy enough.

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Easy Sourdough Starter Recipe​

Ingredients:

• 
  4 ounces cold water
  
  
• 
  2 ounces high gluten bread flour
  
  
• 
  2 ounces organic rye flour (I use Bob’s Red Mill stone ground dark rye)
  
  
• 
  ¼ to ½ teaspoon raw honey
  

1. Add equal parts (by weight) room temperature water and whole wheat or rye flour to a wide bowl. Optionally, you can sub in a portion of high gluten white bread flour (as I do in this recipe—I’ll explain the process in the troubleshooting section below.) I also mix in a half teaspoon or so of raw honey. This is optional, but it’s the way I was taught. (It keeps working, so I keep doing it.)

Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann

2. Mix everything together until there are no dry spots left. Your wild yeast bait is set. Leave the bowl uncovered in your kitchen for an hour or two. It’s okay if it dries on the edges a little. The wild yeast floating in the air will be attracted to your whole wheat or rye gloop and get stuck there.

3. After the yeast catching time has passed, mix the paste again and transfer the starter to a jar or tall cup and cover it with plastic wrap or a lid. Don’t make the lid completely airtight. (If everything goes well, the yeast will start to produce gas, and you want to give it a way out.) Use a piece of masking tape (I like to write the date and time on it), or a rubber band around the container to mark the height of the paste so you can see the growth later, or take pictures of it so you can refer back to them. Leave the starter alone to sit at room temperature for 72 hours.

The starter paste is stiff and only reaches the middle of the tape. Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann

Signs your sourdough starter is starting off right​

This is the annoying part—or fascinating part, depending on your personality. The wild yeast is invisible and you won’t be able to tell if you caught enough for about 48 hours, but there are signs you can look for that tell you things are going to plan.

After 24 hours: The paste will look like it’s relaxed into the container, and not as stiff as before. The jar will look slightly more full, but you won’t see much growth or many (if any) bubbles.

After 48 hours: The starter should have lots of small bubbles and look a little foamy on the top layer. It will have grown in size about 50% to 100%.

After 48 hours I can see many small bubbles developing and the surface has risen to the top of the tape. Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann

After 64 to 72 hours: The starter should be fully active, frothy, and about triple its starting size. It should look alive and smell sour. It's rather unpleasant, but that's a good sign.

After 64 hours, my starter is frothy and ready to use or feed. Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann

What to do if your starter didn’t start​

If you don’t see any of these signs after 48 hours—besides maybe a funky smell and a developing layer of slimy liquid—and your flour and water paste has not become bubbly at all within 72 hours, then you didn’t catch enough wild yeast. Discard this paste and start again. Use the tips below to ensure you catch enough wild yeast on the next attempt.

Problem: My starter never made any bubbles.​

Use the right ingredients. Don’t skip on the whole wheat or rye wheat flour. They have more nutrients that benefit yeast growth, so it pays off to use one of them. All purpose flour, even bread flour, but especially bleached flours, all get stripped of some nutritious components. Don’t worry, you can switch your starter over to a white flour when you feed it, so don’t assume you have to make rye or whole wheat bread loaves based on your starter. This doesn’t mean white flour can’t work for a sourdough starter, but if you’re having trouble, using other flours might increase your yeast development.

Try adding honey, if you skipped it. It doesn’t take much, but raw, organic honey can be just the thing to boost yeast development. It has its own neighborhood of microorganisms and can give wild yeast something to snack on.

Capture natural yeast with a grape or onion peel. There are other sources of wild yeast than the stuff floating in the air. Yeast coats the outside of a lot of different produce, and grapes and onions are sure to have it. After you mix your water, flour, and honey together, tuck an unwashed grape or a strip of onion paper (the dry outer layers of any onion) into the paste. Cover it completely and let it sit like this for the first 24 hours, then remove the grape or onion and discard it. Continue to age the starter for another 48 hours and look for signs of life as outlined above.

Use a bowl to catch yeast. It might only be a small change you need. In the directions above, I say to mix the starter paste in a wide bowl and leave it at room temperature to catch the yeast. Make sure you’re not skipping this step and putting the paste directly into a jar or other container with tall sides and a small mouth, which will make it harder to catch yeast. Unless your kitchen is particularly gusty, you might be blocking off air flow. The wide bowl allows for plenty of the wild yeast in the air to flow over the paste and get stuck.

Problem: My starter made bubbles but hardly grew.​

Substitute a portion of white high-gluten bread flour. In my recipe above, I substitute two ounces of rye flour for high-gluten flour to make a stronger gluten network. Rye and whole wheat flours are sometimes stone ground, so there’s a chance that the texture is too coarse to trap the air bubbles your yeast is making.

If you’re using only rye flour or a coarse whole wheat, you might see air bubbles foaming up but not really rising much. This means your starter is alive, but there’s no net to trap the bubbles. If this is the case, when you next feed your starter, use high gluten flour. Thoroughly mix the preferment to develop the gluten network and age the starter for another 24 hours. You should see a big difference in height.

If you’re making a starter from scratch, use my recipe above, which replaces half of the total flour measurement with high gluten flour, leaving the other half as rye or whole wheat.

How to feed a sourdough starter​

Once you’ve got a strong bubbling starter, you can use it all right away, or you can age it. I’m sure you’ve heard of folks talk of keeping their starter alive for years or decades, sometimes longer. The key to keeping the starter, or mother, alive for long periods of time is to feed it every day so it doesn’t die.

I used half of my sourdough start and fed the other half. Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann

The right ratio to feed your sourdough "mother"​

To feed the starter, you’ll need to mix in its total weight in additional flour and water. This means if your starter weighs 10 ounces, you’ll add five ounces of water and five ounces of high-gluten flour, for a total of 10 ounces of “food.” Then you’ll have 20 ounces of starter.

You can see how this amount would quickly get out of hand if you just kept doubling your starter every day for three days. Most folks opt to feed half and discard the other half, so the weight stays the same as the flavor deepens. However, if you’re planning on making eight sourdough boules next week, maybe you’ll need a large amount of starter, so you might not discard any right away. Whatever amount you eventually need, you want equal amounts of mother starter and new stuff every time you feed it.

The steps to feed a sourdough starter​

1. Use your kitchen scale so you know how much weight you need to add. Measure out as much starter as you need into a mixing bowl. The other half of the starter gets discarded. Throw it away, or make something with it right away. (More on that in a moment.)

2. Add an equal parts ratio of water to high gluten flour to the mixing bowl. Again, if you’re using eight ounces of starter, add equal parts water and flour—so four ounces each for a total of eight ounces—to the bowl. Mix it thoroughly so no dry patches remain.

3. Put it back in the jar and cover it. Leave it at room temperature for 12 to 24 hours before feeding it again or using it.

Using your sourdough starter​

Instead of discarding half your starter, you can use it to make something. As long as it’s at the height of its bubble production (its potency fades if it needs to be fed again), it can be used in a bread recipe, pancake recipe, biscuits, crepes, crumpets, or crackers—anything you can dream up.

When you’re ready to use the starter for real, whether it’s the waste portion or the entire amount, you want to time it for peak potency. That will be approximately 12 to 24 hours after the last feeding. After caring for your starter for a couple days, you’ll begin to understand when that window opens and closes. It’s at the height of its growth before deflating, actively making the most bubbles before wearing out. You’ll get the best performance from your starter during this time.

If you’re still intimidated by a 100% sourdough starter bread recipe, remember that it can be used as a flavor enhancer for recipes with quick-acting yeast too. Search for recipes that include both starter and commercial yeast for speed, like this one from King Arthur Baking.

If there’s anything you should take away from this troubleshooting guide, it’s that there are a lot of variables in nursing a sourdough starter, and it’s okay if yours doesn’t come out right the first time. Be patient, don’t give up, and don’t forget to feed your mother.
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