re: Making a Sourdough Starter

With all due respect, ^^this post is a great example of the “lore” passed around about sourdough that is simply scientifically wrong. Excellent sourdough can be made anywhere in the world. The yeast is mostly NOT floating through the air—it is present on the surface of the grain as it grows in the field, and it remains present in the resulting ground flour (though less so in chemically bleached flours). The character of a sourdough has little to do with locale and everything to do with feeding and care of the culture. Some regional traditions exist—like the use of young, liquid levain style starters used in France that produce mildly sour loaves, or the San Francisco style extra-sour, which benefit from very cool ambient temps and long fermentation. But those regional styles can be reproduced if you follow the feeding schedules and techniques used by those baking traditions.

Yes, you can mail order various sourdough strains. But as you feed them with non sterile flour and keep them at whatever temp and feeding schedule you prefer, certain secondary lactobacillus strains will colonize the culture along with the yeast. It’s not going to remain “purely” whatever you purchased unless you are feeding it with sterile flour, sterile water, and your kitchen has lab-level cleanliness. (If you want to geek out on that sort of thing, follow Seamus Blackley on Twitter—he cultured an ancient Egyptian yeast and is baking bread in Egyptian style pots in hole in the ground ovens. But his kitchen contains an autoclave.)

LA has several bakers turning out sourdough in commercial quantities that is every bit as excellent as any sours in the world. Most notable is Bellwgarde Bakery, which is still open to sell preordered bread.

Looking good Hat!! Your journey has just begun.

Thanks, y’all!

It really is damn tasty. I’m going to work on making #2 soon

Looks like you got a decent rise. I encourage you to bake the same loaf again a few times before changing to a different recipe. Increase the bake time (loaf is quite pale) and increase the oven temp about 25-50:degrees (I usually bake at 450-475 for large round loaves). Practicing the same recipe a few times means you can focus on technique over ingredients. There are craft/skills elements to breadbaking, technique, that aren’t improved with a new recipe—they’ll only,get better with practice.

I’m going to do just that.


This go I did 450* for 25 min. I checked it and went 5 more. Pulled it out, decided it needed 5 more and did that lol


Next time will be 475* for 30 min and then 5-10 min uncovered

I have a conventional oven, not convection if that matters

Yes, just what hungryone said. I used the dregs from my homebrew sour beer as my initial starter feed. Over time I’m sure the LABs (lactic acid bacteria) on the flour have overtaken the LABs from those dregs, but it’s still fun to think that I’ve made bread and beer from the same wild bacteria.

Also, I’m trying my hand on my first levain loaf, Sunday. Will be doing my levain tomorrow from my starter and baking Sunday.

You can indeed keep feeding the preferment you spiked with commercial yeast. What other secondary bacteria colonies are determined by your holding temp and feeding schedule, and hydration percentage (water:flour ratio). Keep it in the fridge, or live in a place where ambient kitchen temps are quite cool, and you will end up with a slower growing, rather sour culture.

On the other hand, keep it warm, feed it often (4-6 hrs), and keep it on the liquid side (100% hydration, or equal parts water and flour), and the culture will be sweet and mild.

This is where the regional baking traditions around the world begin to differ. Climate, commercial production schedules vs home production schedules, variety of local/typical wheats, etc

In the example above, I’m simply using a percentage to express the hydration of the starter culture. I always keep:my starter af equal parts water and flour to make things simple if I want to build a preferentent or levain that is of a different hydration.