Starting a starter

Starting a starter

Before we get started, I'd like to comment that this page has caused more trouble, more unhappy email, and more failures than any other page in this web site.

The problem? Beginners who want to start their own starter. When you're beginning you really don't know what a healthy starter should look like, what it should smell like, and they don't know how to tell when things have gone wrong. So, people tend to not really follow the directions, to use the starter too soon - sometimes before it's even a starter - and the results are either bricks or door-stops. And this causes discouragement and sourdough dropouts.

I can not over-emphasize that the best way to get started in sourdough is with a known good starter. It eliminates so many of the variables as you embark on the sourdough journey. And this is even more true if you aren't an experienced baker... you're just battling too many demons at once.

If you are a sourdough beginner, I strongly encourage you to get a known good starter. Perhaps from a friend who can also help answer your sourdough questions. If you don't have a friend who is a sourdough baker, you might get a starter from a commercial source such as Sourdoughs International, or King Arthur Flour, or Northwest Sourdough; or from a non-profit source, such as the Friends of Carl, who make Carl Griffith's 1847 Oregon Trail starter available for the cost of a stamped, self-addressed envelope.

If you don't have any baking experience, I suggest you get some before you start down the sourdough path. I've put together a painless introduction to baking that should have you baking in less than a day. Please give it a try.

If you're a sourdough beginner,
please, PLEASE, PLEASE don't start here!

Still, sooner or later, most sourdough fans want to start their own starter.

The mythology of sourdough is that you are capturing yeast from the air. However, there are many reasons to believe that just doesn't happen. When people take care to sterilize the flour and water they use to catch a culture, it fails more often than not. When they don't sterilize, it almost always does work. In short, the flour has wild yeast in it, and chances are you are providing the lactobacillus from your skin. All you need to do is encourage their growth.

A few years back the lot behind our house was being sold. We decided to buy it. The lot was a vacant, untended lot in our home town. It was a weed patch. And it was aggravating the neighbor's sinuses. When the neighbor's found out we had bought it, the hinted it was time SOMEONE started taking care of the lot. We really didn't want to sod the lot, nor did we want to seed it. A bit of reading, and we had our strategy in hand. We weren't shooting for a lawn that could be featured in a gardening magazine, just something that would be OK and not make the neighbors sick.

The grasses people cultivate like to be watered often, so we ran a hose to the lot behind our house and started watering the lot regularly. Next, most weeds like to grow tall, so we started mowing the back fourty as often as we mowed our own lawn. Our mower is a mulching mower, and the theory is that the mower will destroy weed seeds and chop the grass and weeds so finely it would decompose and quickly act as fertilizer. When we had some fertilizer or weed'n'feed left over from our yard, we'd put it on the back fourty.

The first year we did this, the lot was better largely because we were knocking the tops off the weeds. The second year, we started having grass move in from the neighbors lots. Each year there were fewer weeds and more grass. It never became a candidate for inclusion in a gardening magazine, but it was from the worst lot in town.

You're probably wondering why I told that story. Honestly, it is the best analogy to starting a sourdough starter I have been able to come up with. And it IS a true story. When you use whole grain rye or wheat flour, the flour is covered with a LOT of microorganisms. We're interested in two of them, yeast and lactobacillus bacteria. When we mix flour and water, and keep adding more flour and water we are encouraging the critters we want to take over the starter. By creating a hospitable environment, the critters we want will inevitably take over the culture. However, just as in the back 40, you are never completly rid of weeds, or the unwanted microorganisms. As long as you keep the conditions in your starter favorable, the unwanted critters will be kept under control. But, just as in the back 40, if you stop treating the starter right the unwanted critters can take over.

Some people suggest using fruit, such as grapes; vegetables, such as cabbage; or even commercial bakers yeast to help start a culture. That's not necessary. In fact, it slows things down. You see, the yeast on grapes or cabbage are the ones that thrive there, rather than the yeast that thrive in wheat or rye flour. As mentioned in the "What IS sourdough?" FAQ, bakers yeast won't survive in a starter. What you want is yeast that will thrive and survive in a grain based sourdough starter. So, just use the yeast and lactobacillus that is already on the grain.

A recurring question with regards to sourdough starter is what sort of water may be used with it. Many people insist that sourdough starter can be killed by chlorinated water. Others say that it can not be started with chlorinated water. In my experience, chlorinated water has not been a problem. I have started, fed and used starters with chlorinated water with no problems. However, I have heard that the more persistent forms of chlorine used by some cities, such as chloramine, can cause problems.

In general, if your tap water smells and tastes good it will probably work well with sourdough. If you have problems with your starters, you may want to try using dechlorinated water. Since few home filters will remove chlorine from water, and from what I am told neither boiling nor standing will remove chloramine, I suggest that you try bottled water if you are experiencing what you think might be water related problems with your sourdough.

We are showcasing three different ways of starting starters. Links to these methods are in the navigation bar to the left, and will be repeated below. All of these ways of starting starters work, and in the end the results are very similar and the processes have a lot in common. In each case, the baker creates an environment that is favorable to the growth of sourdough friendly yeast and sourdough bacteria. As the yeast and bacteria grow, they displace competing organisms. Sourdough bacteria create an acidic environment that most micro-organisms have trouble coping with. The sourdough bacteria also produce 50 additional chemicals that have been identified as having properties that inhibit the growth of other micro-organisms.

A Polite Request If you are starting a starter using my instructions and have trouble, I would greatly appreciate it if you would contact me FIRST if you are having problems with your starter. I really do care about your sourdough success, and if there are problems with my instructions, I would like to correct them. On the menu of each page at this web site is a "contact us" link. Please use it so I can help you. Thanks, Mike

The three ways that we'll talk about are a method that Professor Calvel describes in his book, "The Taste of Bread", the desem technique that Laurel Robertson describes in "The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book", and finally my own method which is derived from many discussions in the usenet newsgroup rec.food.sourdough. There are links to the left that will take you to the pages with the techniques. In all cases, keep feeding your starter for at least a week at room temperature to give it time to mature.

An Important Note

For some time I've been getting emails about starters that begin, "My starter took off faster than you said it would - it was really bubbly the second day! But a day or two later, it was dead! Did I kill it, or what?"

It turns out that I'm not the only one who gets these emails. Peter Reinhart, author of many beautiful bread books, got them also.

My usual suggestion is to just keep feeding the starters, and that seems to work. He has a bit more information, and a possibly better solution.

Some of his friends at the King Arthur Baking Circle (www.kingarthurflour.com), discovered that a strain of bacteria called leuconostoc exists in a lot of flour. It also seems this is more common today than a few years back.

This bacteria masquerades as yeast in the early stage of a sourdough starter, in that it generates a lot of carbon dioxide making it appear that the wild yeast cells are growing rapidly. However, the wild yeast really needs a more acidic environment than exists during the first few days of the starter's existence and, unfortunately, the leuconostoc interferes with yeast growth during this grand masquerade. At a certain point, as the bacteria causes the dough to become more acidic, the acid actually de-activates the leuconostoc (it actually contributes to its own demise), but the wild yeast have not had a chance to propogate and grow in numbers, so there is a domancy period in which nothing seems to be happening.

This is when I get the panicked letters, because they think they may have killed their starter when it did not seem to respond to a Day 3 or Day 4 feeding, and threw it out. Others waited and saw mold form on the top of the starter and, of course, they too threw it out.

Here are two solutions to the problem:
If you are just starting your starter from from scratch, use canned pineapple juice instead of water during the first two days of feeding. The acid in the juice is just at the right ph level to acidify the dough to the yeast's liking but not to the leuconostoc. The starter should then work like a good starter should. You should then switch to back to water from Day Three onward, and the pineapple juice will dilute out as you feed and refresh your starter daily.

Peter Reinhart also suggests stirring the starter to aerate it two or three times a day as the air will help the yeast grow. If you followed my instructions above and are feeding your starter twice a day, you have that under control already. In the past, I have suggested that the people just have faith and keep feeding their starter, and that has worked. Lastly, I have not seen this happen when people start their cultures with rye flour rather than wheat.

In case you missed the links to the left, and the links above, we are featuring three different ways of starting starters. These are Professor Calvel's starter, a Desem starter inspired by Laurel Robertson's book, and my own method.