Four Essential Tips To Make Your Sourdough Starter Actually Work

I could not get a sourdough starter to act the way that everyone said that it should.

And every time that I heard of someone having great success with theirs, making beautiful loaves of bread, or pretzels, or cinnamon rolls, I would look at my own attempts and feel defeated.

There I was, with a sad little jar of very inactive starter and zero success with using it in any baking.

I read a lot of recipes and watched so many videos — it was an insane amount of time spent on something that clearly was not working well for me.

Something had to give. And I was determined to not give up on sourdough.

I tried something a little bit different.

I stopped trying to fit into one of the many instructional recipes for “guaranteed” success, and I started only paying attention to the rules behind WHY they made their starters using their method.

This changed the game for me. I saw undeniable activity happening for the first time ever. And as I will share with you, activity in the starter is the first and very best sign that you are on the right track.

In this post, I am offering you some non-instructional, non-recipe-specific sourdough tips. Not to worry though, there is a loose recipe at the bottom of the post. But please read the tips. They will be much more helpful than any recipe I could give you.

So this isn’t so much a “how to” format, as it is some of the best advice that helped my sourdough starter thrive.

Sourdough starter information out there can be extremely overwhelming, but it’s not as complicated as it’s often made out to be. The singular “aha” moment is when realizing that the same rules for making a loaf of sourdough bread applies to creating and maintaining a starter.

Every time you use sourdough, the process and “exact” instructions are different. This is because the environment is always different. Consider the temperature, the humidity level, the types of water and flour you use, even your ability to commit amounts of time to preparing the starter may differ every single time you interact with it.

This means that, unless you are living in an extremely regulated bubble of an environment, there is no “perfect” recipe for making a starter.

It is an art, not a science.

What worked for someone else’s environment may not work for yours, so following their recipe to a “T” might leave you feeling like you are incompetent.

You aren’t. Your environment is unique.

So I won’t try to tell you an exact recipe, I will tell you some adjustable tips that were really essential in my starter really getting going.

The Four Essential Tips

number 1.

Understand what actually happens each time you feed the starter.

This makes sourdough a lot less scary and uncertain.

To give a short scientific explanation…

When you combine flour and water together, the yeast and bacteria in your kitchen environment come into the water and flour mixture. As they feed off of the sugars in the mix, C02 is released, which are the bubbles that you see in an active sourdough starter.

At first, these bubbles may be small or inconsistent. But as you go through the initial feedings, the amount of yeast and bacteria in your starter grows larger and stronger. This is seen by the bubbles coming and going in a more consistent amount and time frame after each feeding. When the starter begins to reliably and consistently double in size with every feeding, you have what’s called a “mature” starter (this will most likely take between a week and three weeks of starting a new sourdough starter).

number 2.

Your ratio is important. The ratio refers to the amount of starter, to water and flour. Your starter is always going to be the base ratio that your water and flour is measured to.

You always want to put at least the same amount of water and the same amount of flour into your mixture as the amount of sourdough starter that you are starting with. For example, if I have 50 grams of starter in my container, I want to put at the very least 50 grams of water and 50grams of flour into that mixture. This is a 1:1:1 ratio.

Without adding the minimum amount into your starter, it never has enough food to rise up to double its base height before running out and dying back down to an inactive state.

I have seen some people add much more flour and water to their starter, for example a 1:5:5 ratio — so what this would look like is the sourdough starter being 50 grams, and you add 250 grams of flour and water each.

My personal sweet spot is a 1:3:3 ratio. It takes my starter four hours to double in size.

The important thing to note about ratios is that it takes a different amount of time for each person’s starter to reach its “peak maturity” meaning its fully risen state before the production of C02 begins to drop.

So when you are feeding it, observe how long it’s taking to reach that peak, if at all. If it isn’t, try feeding it more. You will definitely need to play around with your ratio to find one that works consistently for your environment.

BONUS FACT

If you want to double a recipe and need a larger amount of starter, you can adjust the ratio accordingly. Just make sure that you account for a different length of time it may take for your starter to reach peak maturity.

number 3.

It’s important that your starter is able to double in size.

If it cannot, you cannot expect it to rise a loaf of bread. Sounds simple, but it took me a while to realize that this is the most important thing that I was missing in my bread attempts.

So if your starter fails to meet every other qualification for what a starter “must” do…know that it must rise in order to be used as an active rising agent in recipes.

Your starter is a mini version of what you want your bread product to ultimately do. So if you’re not looking for a super huge rise in your bread, you don’t need to use your starter exactly at it’s peak. It can be under or over its peak point, but probably not too over or too under.

You still want to be able to notably see that there is activity going on in the starter. A good simple way to think about it is this — the amount of activity you see in your starter (ranging from a lot to a little, but not none) is the amount of activity you will see in your bread.

number 4.

I made a mistake that ended up jumpstarting my starter.

I was just getting mine starter established, and had been regularly feeding it for about a week. Then I accidentally left it unfed for 48 hours instead the 24 hours between feedings that people recommend. And that really boosted the bacteria content right out the gate. When I fed it the next day, it was very alive, bubbly, and just about doubled in size.

So my mistake turned out to be a benefit. I’m not saying it always works, but you can try it if you want to get your starter up and going a bit quicker than normal.

If you want to learn more about making sourdough bread and learning how to cook great food, check out my blog:

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