I started trying to make my own starter in April of 2018. I started it with just the cheapest All purpose flour et the store and it took awhile for it to get established enough to make a loaf of bread. The first bread I made with it was mid May. It worked and for the first couple years, my starter lived in the refrigerator. I would take it out and let it come to room temp and then pull some out to bake with. I would feed the starter and put it back in the fridge but it seemed like it would take a couple feedings each time to be ready to bake with.
I needed a name so I borrowed an old Movie title to call mine "Raising Arizona".
It worked good and made good bread, but there was no sour taste to it and as I started looking into how to make it more sour, I started looking at other types of flour. I have never been into "organic" anything, but I knew I should not be using bleached flour. At that point I bought some Unbleached unbromated bread flout called Harvest King to start using. I also got some medium rye flour to feed the starter to make it more sour.
I took my starter and started feeding the original one the same A/P flour plus 2 new jars and I wanted to keep them out on the counter, which means they need to be fed daily, so I started keeping a much smaller amount and only feeding 15 grams of starter. One of the new ones I fed just the Harvest King, the other I mixed the Harvest King with the Medium Rye at a 50/50 ratio.
At some point, I just dried some of the orginal stuff to save it and stopped feeding that one and just kept the other two, but they are well established and over 6 years old now. I typically mix the two starters 50/50 when I am baking, just using what I have on hand... one is a little more active the other a little more sour, so if you have a preference, I can use one or the other and make the bread a little more mild or more sour upon request, there are other ways to make it extra sour, if that is what you want.
Maintaining a Sourdough Starter
If you are going to get into Sourdough, the first thing I will say is get a kitchen scale if you don't already have one, because most recipes are shared in grams, but it is just alot easier to do than measuring with cups when you get used to it and it is WAY more accurate.
When feeding your starter, you want to feed it equal weight of water and flour so if you are using a measuring cup or spoons it is roughly double the amount of flour than water by volume to be equal in weight, it will work, but again it is harder to maintain a 100% Hyrdrated starter.
I only feed 15 grams so a 1:1:1 ratio is 15 grams of starter, 15 of water and 15 of flour. But with the temps of my house the starter was wanting to be fed every 12 hours at this ratio, so I doubled it to get me to one feeding every 24 hours. This worked great for the one with the Rye flour but the one without was still pretty thin after 24 hours to I bumped it up to a 1:3:3 ratio, meaning 15 grams of starter and 45 each of water and flour.
With the starter living on the counter, only feeding 15 grams leaves alot of discard. I hate wasting things, so I save my discard, because there are a ton of things you can do with it. I use it as a thickener, make tempura with it and there a all kinds of recipes that call for discard instead of activee starter, like my English Muffins for one example.
Once you have an established starter you like, I highly recommend drying some out as a backup, in case something happens to your active jar. It is really easy to do, feed it, wait for it to get really active (I usually do it just before it peaks) line a baking sheet with partchment papaer and spread a thin layer on it. Then just put that in your oven with the light on and let it dry out. If you get it thin enough it was be dry in 24 hours or less. Then just break it up and store in a air tight container, and I keep mine in the freezer.
I recently ran across the first bag I dried out from my original starter and it was 5 years old so I wanted to rehydrate it and see if it still worked. I baked a loaf 2 days later.
Just a note on sourdough starters in general and the 200+ year old ones you see advertised. A Starter will change based on environment and the specific flour it is fed, So while the culture may indeed be 200+ years old, it is probably been fed something different at some point or had environmental changes that made it different than it was 200 years ago.
What is Discard
When you feed the starter you only feed a portion of it and throw the rest away, or save it to make discard recipes as some call for unfed discard instead of active starter. The unfed discard lives in the fridge, In reality, this is just "pre-fermented" flour and most any recipe can be converted to sourdough by reducing the water and flour each by half the weight of the discard or starter used.
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