Recipe: How to make and keep a bread starter
Basic bread is made with four ingredients: flour, water, salt and leavening.
A leavening is something that makes bread rise.
One category of industrial-age bread uses a chemical leavening — usually baking soda, baking powder or cream of tartar. This kind of leavening is the most convenient, but does a poor job leavening and effects zero fermentation on grain.
The other industrial-age leavening agent is yeast, an isolated single species of yeast called saccharomyces cerevisiae — the same species used by beer brewers. Baker's yeast does a great job leavening bread (making it rise) but a bad job fermenting it (transforming it into something far healthier, tastier and longer-lasting).
Traditional leavened bread uses a symbiotic balance of several or dozens of species of both yeast and bacteria that work together to produce naturally leavened bread through the process of natural or wild fermentation. A natural leaven does a great job leavening bread and and a fantastic job fermenting it. That fermentation radically improves the taste, texture, longevity and health qualities of bread.
You can buy only industrial leavens at the supermarket. You can't buy a natural leaven. But you can make your own.
The microorganisms for natural leavening are kept alive and in balance in a starter, which is simply dough in the process of fermentation. That fermentation process is slowed way down by refrigeration, but doesn't have to be. A sourdough starter kept at room temperature needs to be fed a couple times a day at least. But a starter kept in the fridge can survive more than a month without feeding.
You can acquire a starter or you can make your own (if you're a Spartan Diet paid subscriber and would like our 600-year-old Venetian starter (from Venice), please send email to: amira.elgan@gmail.com, and we'll send it to you).
People used to believe that making a starter involved capturing the yeast and bacteria from the air in your kitchen and cultivating it in flour and water. Now we know that the yeast and bacteria are mainly present in the grain itself — which makes sense: The grains were exposed to the outside air for months before harvesting.
Every grain (and, in fact, everything thing exposed to outside air) is covered in thousands of species of yeast, bacteria and fungus, all microscopic. When you grind these grains into flour and add water, the process of decomposition begins. The microbes enter into a competition with each other to consume the grains. It starts to spoil or rot, just like any other organic material with access to water.
But by "feeding" with additional flour and water and maintaining it a certain temperature (neither super hot nor super cold), most of the thousands of microbes continue to survive. Among the survivors are lactic acid bacteria, which are bacteria that feed on sugar in the grain and produce lactic acid as a waste product. While lactic acid bacteria thrive in the increasingly acidic environment, most other bacteria are killed by it, including pathogenic bacteria and microbes that cause spoilage. With additional feeding, the lactic acid bacteria end up dominating and killing off nearly all other microbes with their acidification of the mixture.
Certain species of yeast love the acidic environment as well. As the acidification kills off competitors, that yeast thrives and grows, feeding on the sugar in the grain and producing carbon dioxide and ethanol as waste products (resulting in the creation of gas bubbles — the leavening or rising of bread).
In other words, the making of a starter is the process of feeding microbes until the acid-loving bacteria create an acidic environment that only they and yeast can tolerate. What started as tens of thousands of species in your starter ends up with two or three dozen species.
Don’t be confused or intimidated by this process. It’s all very forgiving, and you’ll really learn how to do it by repetition and paying attention to your results.
So let's make a starter.
How to make a sourdough starter
A starter lives in the refrigerator, and can stay viable on its own without feeding for at least a month, maybe two.
Every time you "feed" a leavening, you combine an equal amount of leavening with flour, plus enough water to get the consistency you're after.
The water you add should be roughly room temperature. Not warm, but not chilly, either. Anywhere between 70 and 75 degrees. I pour water on my wrist, and if I can't really feel cool or warm -- if it feels like I can't feel the temperature -- it's about right.
Steps to make starter from scratch:
Place a half cup of flour in a bowl and mix in enough water to make a consistency roughly equivalent to toothpaste. The water should be between 70 and 75 degrees Fahrenheit. (If it's too watery or too dry, don't worry — it still works.)
Leave it covered on the counter for two days. (It will smell bad. Don't worry.)
Feed it by discarding half the mixture, then adding another quarter cup of flour and enough room-temperature water to bring it back to toothpaste consistency.
Leave it covered on the counter for two more days. Feed again.
Leave it covered on the counter for one day. Feed again.
Leave it covered on the counter for one day. Feed again.
Leave it covered on the counter for a half day. Feed again.
Now feed your starter three times a day — first thing in the morning, once midday and once before going to bed. It should smell great — like the breath of a breastfeeding baby.
Congratulations! You now have a starter. If you keep it alive you'll never need to make another one from scratch.
You've noticed that your starter stays at just over a half cup. On the last feeding before refrigeration or baking, don't discard any but double it to one cup. If it's headed for the fridge: Immediately after this feeding, place your starter in a jar with the lid not closed airtight and place it in the fridge. If it's to be used for baking, let the starter sit for 4-6 hours on the counter after feeding before using as an ingredient in your bread.
Steps to make leavening from starter
Wait, what?
Think of a starter as a medium of flour and water for keeping your yeast and bacteria alive. That starter in your fridge is not ready to be used as an ingredient. It's alive, but tired and groggy.
Think of a leavening as an ingredient in bread. It's fed, revived and at peak microbial activity at the time you use it for bread.
Here's how to go from starter to leavening.
Mix a tablespoon of flour with enough water to make a toothpaste consistency, then add one tablespoon of your cold starter from the fridge. You now have just over ⅛ cup.
Eight hours later (give or take a couple hours), feed by doubling. You now have just over ¼ cup.
First thing next morning, feed by doubling. You now have just over ½ cup.
Four hours later, feed by doubling. You now have just over 1 cup.
Let this sit for four more hours and now you have a little more than a cup of leavening, ready to go.
Steps to refresh a starter and keep it alive
Most people revive their starter by taking it out of the fridge and feeding it in the same jar. But I think this is needlessly messy.
It's best to follow the instructions above for turning a starter into a leavening, but after step 4, place it into a jar and put that in the fridge, replacing the old one.
Better still, make bread by removing the cup of leavening, then feeding the residue left in the jar, building it back up to a full cup before placing that in the fridge.
NOTES
We use starter so often that we keep a starter going on the counter, feeding three times a day, plus we keep starters in the fridge as "backups." We create a starter from our leavening ever week or so, and place that in the fridge with a dated label. So at any given time, we have starter on the counter, plus four or five dated backup jars in the fridge.
Share your starter with friends and family. That way, if yours dies for some reason, you can borrow some back without having to start from scratch.
Whenever you're making or maintaining starter, there's always excess starter, normally called discard. When you're first making a starter, you'll want to throw this away because the yeast and bacteria has not come into balance. But once you have a good starter, you'll want to keep any excess in a big jar in the fridge, where it will keep for a month or two. You can use this fermented dough for pancakes, cake, crackers, English muffins or any number of other uses.
You can make bread more sour by keeping your starter more wet — the consistency of pancake batter. And you can make it less sour by making it less wet — the consistency of dough.