How to Make a Sourdough Starter, the Way We Actually Do It
People are afraid of sourdough starters, and most of the fear is manufactured.
You have heard that you need a hundred year old starter from San Francisco. That you have to feed it on a schedule like an infant. That tap water will kill it. That it takes two weeks and most people fail.
None of that matches what we actually do. This is the process we use at the bakery, start to finish, and it takes three days.
A starter is flour, water, and the things already living in the flour
There is no secret ingredient and nothing to buy.
Flour arrives carrying wild yeast and lactic acid bacteria. Add water and they wake up. Keep feeding them and they multiply until they are the dominant population and everything else gets crowded out. What you end up with is a stable little ecosystem that does two jobs. The yeast makes gas and lifts your bread. The bacteria make acid and give it flavor.
The acid is where sour comes from. Not the yeast. The bacteria.
Those microbes come from the flour, not from your kitchen air. Your house is not seeding it with anything special, and neither is ours.
Two things to get straight before you start
Wheat flour means all purpose or bread flour. When we say wheat, we mean it is a wheat flour and not another grain. Not rice, not oat, not almond. Either all purpose or bread flour will work here.
The percentages are baker's percentages. Everything is measured against your starting flour weight, which is 100%. Pick a number and stick with it. We are going to use 100 grams as the base below because it makes the math easy, so 100% is 100 grams, 150% is 150 grams, 50% is 50 grams.
And yes, you need a scale. Cups will not get you there. We have written about why you weigh everything and about choosing a scale if you want the long version.
Filtered water is better. Tap water is not ideal, and if yours is heavily chlorinated you can leave it out on the counter for a few hours first. But plenty of good starters have been raised on straight tap water and yours probably will be too. Do not let this be the thing that stops you.
Day one: making the chef
Wheat flour 100% (100 g) · Water 100% (100 g) · Yeast, a pinch
Mix everything in a tall container and scrape down the sides. Let it stand at room temperature for 24 hours.
Yes, a pinch of commercial yeast. This is where we part ways with the purists, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. That pinch gets the population moving on day one instead of day six. The wild yeast and bacteria in the flour take over from there, which is why this works in three days instead of ten.
Day two
Wheat flour 100% (100 g) · Water 100% (100 g)
The chef should have almost doubled. There may be a slight musty smell, which is normal, and tiny bubbles on the surface.
Add the flour and water and stir vigorously. Let it stand at room temperature for another 24 hours.
Day three
Wheat flour 100% (100 g) · Water 100% (100 g)
Same procedure. Before you feed it, smell it. It should smell vinegary and acidic. The texture will be bubbly all the way through, with a network of gummy, sticky strands of dough running through it.
That is a ripe chef. It is ready to become a levain.
Turning the chef into a levain
Wheat flour 150% (150 g) · The full batch of chef
Add the flour directly to the chef and stir vigorously to work new oxygen into it. The batter will be stiff. That stiffness is not an accident and it is not a mistake. It is what gives the finished bread its flavor, so do not thin it out.
Let it stand at room temperature for 8 to 10 hours.
Do not let it go past 10 hours. After that the yeast is exhausted and it will not lift your final dough. This is the single most common way people waste three days of work.
At 8 to 10 hours the levain is ready. Go make bread with it.
Keeping the chef alive after you bake
Wheat flour 50% (50 g) · Water 150% (150 g) · The levain you have left
Add the flour and water to whatever levain is left over and mix. If you are baking again within 36 hours, leave it at room temperature. If not, put it in the refrigerator.
Nourishing the chef every week
At least once a week the chef needs fresh food, water, and oxygen.
The full batch of chef · Wheat flour 100% · Water 100%
Every 7 days, throw away one cup of chef, then add the flour and water and mix.
If there is a clear liquid sitting on the surface, just stir it back in. That is hooch, and it means hungry, not dead.
Why you throw a cup away
Because you are diluting. Every feeding lowers the acid and gives the population fresh food. Skip the discard week after week and you end up with a growing container of increasingly sour sludge that cannot lift anything.
Bring it to room temperature. Every time.
Before you feed it and before you bake with it, let it come up to room temperature first.
Cold chef is a sluggish chef. Feed it straight out of the refrigerator and you have just chilled the fresh flour and water too, and it will take hours longer to do anything. Bake with it cold and your timings will all be wrong and you will blame the recipe.
Take it out, let it sit on the counter, then work with it. That one habit fixes more starter problems than anything else on this list.
Things that scare people and should not
Dark or clear liquid on top. That is hooch. It means hungry. Pour it off or stir it in and feed it.
A sharp, acetone, nail polish smell. Also hungry. Feed it sooner or give it more food.
A musty smell on day two. Normal. Keep going.
You forgot about it for a month in the refrigerator. Almost certainly fine. Scrape off anything discolored on the surface, take a spoonful from the middle, and feed it a few times.
And the one that should scare you
Anything pink. Throw all of it out and start over.
Not scrape it. Not save a spoonful from the middle. All of it, and scrub the container properly or replace it. Pink or orange streaking is not your chef, and you do not want to find out what it is. This is the one place we will tell you not to think about it, not to try to save it, and not to go looking online for a workaround. Dump it. Flour is cheap.
Fuzzy growth of any color, same answer.
So can you actually kill one
Yes. It is just hard.
Heat will do it. Above roughly 140 degrees and everything in the container is dead. Long enough neglect will do it. Letting the levain run past 10 hours will exhaust it. Contamination like the pink above means it is gone whether the yeast is alive or not.
But short of those, this is one of the most resilient things you will ever keep in your kitchen. It survived six thousand years of people with no refrigeration and no idea what was happening in the crock. Yours will survive you forgetting about it for a while.
You can name it. Everybody does, and honestly it is a pet. It lives in your kitchen, it needs to eat, it acts different depending on how you treat it, and it will be around a lot longer than most pets if you look after it. Just know it is a considerably tougher pet than anyone told you. The plus side is no pet hair everywhere and you can make some really great bread with it.
Chef Keegan and The Lakehouse Bakery Team
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