Make Your Own Sourdough Starter
If you’re feeling a bit adventurous, you may want to try creating your own sourdough starter from scratch. Baking bread from scratch is satisfying in its own right, but when you’ve also had a hand in the creation of one of the most fundamental components, the leavening agent itself, you’ll feel an even greater satisfaction and connectedness to the process.
Are there kids in your house? This little science project is ideally suited to sharing with any children you can convince to join in. Culture their budding scientific minds while creating your own bread culture.
This video outlines one simple method that worked for me the first time I tried it. In the video, I give credit for this technique to Peter Reinhart. It has since come to my attention that Debra Wink, a chemist and accomplished baker, is the mastermind and author of this Pineapple Juice Technique. A lot of research and testing went into developing and refining the technique. The choice of pineapple juice over other juices is from much trial and error. Debra was kind enough to email her essay on the Pineapple Juice Technique. Click here for a printable copy of it.
As I mention in the video, the wild yeast spores and lactic-acid bacteria that give your starter its leaving properties are all around you. You are simply creating the conditions ideally suited for them to thrive and multiply. I used whole wheat flour in this recipe because fresh whole wheat flour may harbor greater numbers of yeast spores than ordinary all-purpose flour and so increase your likelihood for success. It worked for me, so you might try the same. If, at any time, you wish to transition your whole wheat sourdough starter to a regular white flour starter, it’s super easy to do so.
I’ve listed the ingredients and approximate steps here to save you the note taking.
- Step 1. Mix 3 ½ tbs. whole wheat flour with ¼ cup unsweetened pineapple juice. Cover and set aside for 48 hours at room temperature. Stir vigorously 2-3x/day. (“Unsweetened” in this case simply means no extra sugar added).
- Step 2. Add to the above 2 tbs. whole wheat flour and 2 tbs. pineapple juice. Cover and set aside for a day or two. Stir vigorously 2-3x/day. You should see some activity of fermentation within 48 hours. If you don’t, you may want to toss this and start over (or go buy some!)
- Step 3. Add to the above 5 ¼ tbs. whole wheat flour and 3 tbs. purified water. Cover and set aside for 24 hours.
- Step 4. Add ½ cup whole wheat flour and 1/4 to 1/3 cup purified water. You should have a very healthy sourdough starter by now.
Notes: I do wonder if the fact that I bake all the time with a sourdough starter (and so theoretically have wild yeast floating around our house by the gazillions and covering everything we own) would increase the likelihood that I would have success creating my own sourdough culture from scratch. So I anxiously await feedback from anyone who attempts this process at home. (You’ll see a nifty little form below for comments and feedback. If you’re shy; you can use the Contact link at the top of the page. While I may report your (mis)adventures, I’ll keep your identity anonymous 
.
{ 1425 comments… read them below or add one }
← Previous Comments
Next Comments →
My tapwater instantly kills yeasts of any kind. Can’t use it in the recipes I make either if water is called for.
The main thing is that it not be chlorinated water. So tap water is out for most people.
you mention ” pure spring water”
wont tapwater work? Bottled. Perrier?
does it matter?
thanks
Eric: I am very pleased to report that I have been successful making my first sourdough starter after my 2nd attempt! Thanks to Eric and Laurie for suggesting perserverance and putting my starter in the oven with only the light on periodically. As reported by Eric, I had nothing to show after 48 hours, but after the 2nd feeding of pineapple juice and flour, things really began to happen. According to the directions, added more flour and water this time; and after only a couple of hours the bubbly action and fragrance were very obvious. Now it is on to the the bread making.
I would like to add for anyone who reads down this far that it if you need to pour off excess starter, why not reserve half in the fridge. That way you will have starter already innoculated and ready to be revived when you need it. Also, from home brewing I know that the really active stuff, the stuff with all the yeast, is the froth on the top. It may be to your advantage to pour this off and keep feeding it, tossing the bottom half or reserving it for later use. You will have a more active starter for your trouble!
Update: I poured off half my starter, fed it 1 cup flour and 1/2 cup water and after a day the top was frothy! I stired the froth back in, reserved 1/4 cup, dumped out the rest, and then fed it 1/2 cup flour and about 1/4 cup water. It’s now sitting on top of my fridge.
Once it’s in the frothy stage, is it “healthy”? Is it ok to bake with? Or do I need to wait for it to get stringy? I think the problem I’ve always had with starters is that it never got to the stringy stage. It also doesn’t seem like my starter grows that much. Certainly not doubling.
BTW, this is all done with King Arthur high gluten flour, if that makes a difference.
Bob
Your not doing anything wrong!! You are just much more attentive to your starter than I am. I was simply making a point that it seems starters are pretty flexible and are even hard to kill. I’ve even tried used varying amounts of starter and seem to get the same end result. Keep doing what works for you, don’t fix what isn’t broken.
My bread is more consistent than my husbands because I weigh out the ingredients. His is sometimes wetter or denser due to the flour to water ratio. My starter has never let me down. Not yet at least!!
I am sorry that I have been doing everything wrong.
I am so new to it that I am just feeling my way along.
But am curious as to how consistent YOUR bread is, compared to your husband’s.
On the contrary-
I leave my starter in the back of the fridge. I feed it when I remember which is usually right after I make bread…because I assume I’ll dilute it if I feed it immediately before tossing it in the bowl. I use it cold and hungry and have never had a problem. My hubby uses commercial yeast and bakes more often than I do lately, so I’d say the feedings are maybe every week and a half to two weeks or so. Very scientific. I weigh by scale but hubby measures by volume. Go figure.
BJ,
I keep my starters in the fridge all week. I take them out on Thursday evening and feed them. Feed them again on Friday morning and Friday evening as soon as I get home.
I wait about an hour so they are good and active and make up my dough or sponge.
I feed the leftover and stick it right back in the fridge.
Bob
My starter is alive! Today was the 5th day and even yesterday it was already quite bubbly and sour smelling. After the feeding today it has already grown quite a bit. Very exciting. Your directions worked just as I had hoped. If I refridgerate it will it still remain alive? Would I need to pull it out before I need to use to let it warm up?
I also just made the no-knead sandwich loaf and it did not seem to rise as much as I had hoped. Any suggestions? Thanks for the site, it has been the most helpful I have found. Looking forward to more!
BJ
Yea, feed it once a day. But if you end up with a ton of starter, toss all but 1/4 to 1/2 cup of it and feed that by stirring in 1/2 cup of flour and 1/3 cup of water and let sit undisturbed at room temp for 24 hours and see if you get a rise out of it. Starter can rise and fall back down in the course of a day, so if you can feed it in the morning and check it every few hours or so, then you won’t miss the action if there is any.
The crazy thing is that this still might not work. Getting a starter going from scratch can take a number of attempts. So don’t knock yourself out. If this batch you’re working on is not showing obvious signs of life in the next few days, you might want to bail and try again.
Please let us know what happens.
Should I feed it and stir it during those days?
Hi Louise,
I don’t know but I think I would give it a couple more days.
I followed the pineapple method and it was going along so well (my starter was already bubbly) that I skipped about a day and during step 2 and just went on to step 3 to feed it. I tasted a bit of it before I fed it and it was SOUR and sharp. I fed it and while it bubbled and smells nice, it didn’t double, or get stringy.
Did I ruin my starter? Should I start over or try to save this one?
Tara,
Try using the top of your refrigerator. That is usually pretty warm.
Bob
It’s ALIVE!!! My first attempt at baking from scratch, and it was successful! Tommorow I’m going to try the sourdough no knead recipe! This website is awesome!
One thing I found, our house is quite cold, so I stuck the jar I was growing my starter in near the coffee maker. Not right up against it, but near it, and that really seemed to help.
Laurie/Eric: thanks for the advice. Working on it. Not going to trash this little guy just yet.
I’m new to this too, but it was mentioned that putting your starter into the oven with ONLY the oven light on can be helpful-my oven gets a bit too warm-about 85, so I had to turn it on/off to keep the temp stable, but it did help move things along, as my house is cool like yours.
Good luck!
Hi Bob,
Given your house temp you might want to give it a couple more days. Even under the best conditions (whatever they are) success isn’t assured and you have to start over. You could start a second trial now and run the two concurrently but just staggered.
I am in Day 4 of making Sourdough Starter and no results. Our average house temperature is about 64-67F. I followed the recipe as required. I will try another day and then if no results…..start over? Any suggestions much appreciated. BTW for pineapple juice i used the juice from a fresh pineapple.
Thanks!
Hi James,
Regarding the too dark bottom of your bread, a lot of people have found that placing a cookie sheet underneath the loaf pan (or cloche, Dutch oven or whatever) goes a long way to preventing burned bottoms. One person recently mentioned that putting the sheet near the bottom of the oven works best.
Hi Laurie,
The proportions aren’t important so much. It’s just easier to monitor the progress of the starter when the mix is on the thick side. A thicker starter will do a better job of trapping the air bubbles, causing it to rise. It’s nice to see the rise… you know something good is happening.
one thing I forgot to say above. My bottom crust using pyrex loaf pans came out a little too dark and crusty. Do I need to lower temperatures for altitude?
I live in the high desert southwest at nearly a mile elevation so I think that explains why my starter had a slow pace to begin with. I have used organic rye flour for the starter. There were no signs of life at 48 hours. At the second feeding (4 day mark) I was getting ready to stir and deciding weather or not to start over when I noticed some darker shapes against the side of the plastic container. Not sure if they were voids from stirring I went ahead and at the end of day 5 I was bubbling at a stately pace. On day 6 I doubled my starter to make some bread day 7.
My starter was still a baby but I had company coming in and I had to try it. I did a bastardized thing to start. Since I am a grad student getting ready for orals with no time, I bought two bread machine mixes and made two loaves per instructions adding a cup of my starter to each. The rye and the white sourdough did not quite want to mix and stayed visually distinct at baking. The result was a bit too close grained as is common for store bought mixes but it was moist and sour in a unsophisticated (baby) sort of way but was very pretty and marbled like squa bread between the rye and the white. I cant wait to try the real stuff this week.
Jim
Hi Jim;
I made your Pizza dough & enjoyed the recipe, thanks
I used your recipe for Sourdough starter as well, and despite an error I made, it looks as though it is working! I read the directions, and still managed to skip a step-for some reason I expected activity after the first 48 hours, so I did not feed the starter as directed. I could smell yeast, though, so I decided to wait one more day since our house runs on the cool side. This morning (60 hrs later) I had lots of activity 
Now, my problem: I decided to skip the feeding with pineapple juice step, since I had yeast, and went right to step 3. Then realized, DUH! my proportions will be off-will this affect the final starter? Or are the proportions really just “guidelines” ?
Thanks for the great website-
Laurie
Hi Jim,
Your starter seems lively indeed but a bit on the strong side. It should mellow out after you feed it well a couple times.
Hi Eric, For the past week I have attempted and suceeded at making sour-dough starter using your recipe! My house is staying a little on the cool side this winter so the wild yeast didn’t seem to be doing much of anything for a few days, so I placed the jar on a heating register on the floor of the house to keep it warm and, WA-LA, I got yeast action and alot of it! Smells strongly of alchohol like bourbon whiskey or something; is this normal?
Hi Eric,
I’ve been trying out your pizza dough with great success recently. One of our favorite toppings is pineapple so when I saw the starter ingredients I figured this was a good time to begin my education in starting a starter.
I mixed my starter about 10 hours ago and it already has a few bubbles, so I am hopeful. I used this as an opportunity to involve my kids in science/cooking. I was looking to start a science experiment today specifically because it is the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birthday. If this starter works out, I will be calling it my Darwin bread:-)
Megan
It’s not sourdough bread, but I used your sourdough starter tutorial to make Ethiopian injera bread! It requires a sourdough starter to get going, and I found that you had the best detailed tutorial online for this. Here is a blog post with pictures detailing the process:
http://www.ericaustinlee.com/2009/02/my-first-home-made-ethiopian-meal/
Thanks so much for the help!
Hi – thanks for all your advice … I have a question:
Why during the final rise, my dough expands sideways as opposed to lifting up? What can be done to get a more evenly risen loaf (more circular slices)?
I normally get a flat, wide bread …
thank you
I read a post by someone using sprouted grains and how quickly their starter took off. This would make sense because grains that have been sprouted have already begun the process of converting starch to sugar and sugar of course is a much more available form of food for your yeast than having to go through the process of converting starch to sugar on its own. I think I am going to go see what I have in the way of sweetener.
By the way, Dextrose Glucose (corn sugar) and Maltose (malt sugar) ferment much more readily than fructose(fruit sugar) and common table sugar. Both are difficult for micro organisms to digest, although they will.
I am going to add a tablespoon of of dried malt extract (DME) and see if this doesn’t get things shaking!
Hi all. I am starting a new starter after my old one was thrown out because it looked “disgusting” sitting in the back of the fridge. AHHHHHHRRRRGGGGG! Hahaha. I just threw any flour I had around and pretty much any starchy water and such so it was a real mutt. Worked great but never real sour though.
Anyway, after i get my new starter up and active I am goign to split it in half and do some experimenting. I brew beer, alot of it and all differnet styles. Belgian “sour” beers were all the rage a couple of years ago and there were amny articles on this style and how to correctly brew it. You may have guessed that much of the sour comes from Lactobaccilus and lactococcus(?) bacteria. I recall that these sour strains are most active at Temperatures above 95 fahrenheit and below 105f. Much to high for Ale and Lager yeasts so this posed a bit of a conundrum. Belgian brews are fermented with naturally occuring airborne yeasts.
I think I will try fermenting one of the batches of starter at a much higher temperature to see if I can induce a more sour flavor.
Perhaps this has already been touched upon but this thread was so long I gave up trying to read through the whole thing.
I will let you all know the results!
Hi Amber.
Any luck yet getting a starter going? Sometimes you just have to try a few times before you’re successful. There’s a measure of luck involved with capturing wild yeast.
Hello Eric,
Many thanks for sharing all of those invaluable videos and information, ONE LOVE!
I will be trying them out:)
Have A Great Day!
Hazel
Trinidad & Tobago
Found your site the other day and decided to have a crack at a sour dough plant again (tried years ago without much success).
Now have a fantastic starter after a week of temperatures over 100 F (its been 45 C plus for a week here now).
I need to try and bake with it now, but its just too hot still to put an oven on… never mind, I'll keep the starter going and see what happens.
Peter.
Amy,
Thanks, but I think baking is more about skill than it is about knowledge. I can research and learn all kinds of facts (and myths) about bread and baking, but it is going to take time and practice before I feel that I am no longer a novice.
It is all fun, though.
Thanks for the tip Dave. I took mine out of the fridge and will read up on those sites. Preety soon you’re going to have to drop “the Novice” eh?!
Eric, just writing to let you know that I made my first pizza doughs using Sourdough starter as per your instructions on video. Pizza came out fantastic. Crust was golden brown with airy pockets in crust, and the taste was fantastic. I will be tweaking recipes for ingredient amounts, as my dough was just a bit wetter than it needed to be,but it was by far my most flavorable dough ever. My starter is only about 3 weeks old, so it still mild, perhaps as it ages it will be a little more tangy. Thanks for the great video, and I placed an order yesterday for a dough wisk and bowl scrapper, as I know I’ll be needing them.
David,
Take a look at this post for a couple of containers I use:
http://www.breadtopia.com/sourdough-no-knead-method/#comment-31953
Hello again,
So, after the white-bread starter (made as per the pineapple-juice video) seemed not to be going anywhere (it didn’t double in volume, as in the video), I decided to take two samples from it, one of which I would continue as a white-flour starter and the other I would try and transition into a rye starter, simply because I happened to have some rye flour in the cupboard. The white one seems, again, not to be going anywhere: there are bubbles whenever I feed it, but it doesn’t “rise” at all. However, after only two feedings the rye starter has exploded overnight, so it looks like we’re back in business!
In light of this, I think it’ll be with the rye starter I’ll try baking my first loaf. It smells foul, but is really active. Do you have experience with rye starters, and do they affect the overall recipes, e.g. the wholegrain sourdough loaf you make in your video? The other question is, for people who don’t have or can’t find a La Cloche, is there another way of baking the same breads? Can they be done in a normal loaf tin, and does this affect the baking times?
Again, many thanks for your help.
Amy,
I’ve been trying to learn everything I can about sourdough, since getting my own starter going a few months ago. This is a great site for that, as is thefreshloaf.com, and Mike Avery’s sourdoughhome.com.
Most of the experts say you should maintain your starter at room temperature for at least a month. They say it takes that long for the microorganisms to stabilize. So, when I read that in more than one authoritative place, I took mine out of the fridge for several weeks.
I found this recipe that sounds kind of like your grandmother-in-law’s recipe. Hope it’s useful.
http://www.videojug.com/film/how-to-make-wild-sourdough-starter
Terry,
I found this starter that sounds kind of like your grandmother-in-law’s.
Hope its useful.
I started my whole wheat flour starter the other day with the pineapple juice. Well it’s been 5 days- with not much action. So what gives? It has few bubbles but not frothy- has a smell. But not yeasty more like fermation of the juice. Is this right? I’m a first timer and not sure at all. Now I’m trying a white starter- keeping it next to the wood stove for warmth. Oregon is a bit chilly lately and tends to keep my kitchen cooler. Room temp is near 70* is that warm enough? I have found your site very useful =)
With much Thanks-
Hi Eric, I am new to bread baking and your website has been a huge help, especially with all of the little nuances that you don’t get in most recipes. THANKS! After 3 tries, I’ve got my own starter (the 1st time I just read the recipe and didn’t watch the video and I smothered it — that’s what I mean by nuances; the 2d time I tried the Joy of cooking dough method and utterly failed). I am looking forward to baking my first loaves later today, 1 rye and 1 spelt, for a dinner party on Saturday (don’t worry, I have a back-up plan). Now that I’ve got a great looking starter, my question is, at what point do I refrigerate it? If I’m going to keep baking once or twice a week, do I just keep feeding it and leave it at room temp? I’ve watched the managing your starter video but didn’t quite get that part. Thanks again for this site!
IT HAS BEEN ACCOMLISHED!!!!! I made a starter as shown on the video and it happened, just like on the video, and I got another amayzing loaf of bread, just like on the video!!!!! un believeable- usually these things don’t go just like they’re meant to for me, see.
and a real perk of only using a little yeast is that the bread stays fresh for a lot longer. this is the third day after baking my no knead malted wholewhaeat baby and it’s astonishingly fresh and cheery!
This is the beginning of something very beautful ,and very delicious my friends.
Let’s give the Breatopia folk a great big round of applause
(sound of prolonger clapping interspersed with whistles and cheers)
Felicity
Mike,
My starter also smells “winey”. That is a great description! I have to say it works beautifully but does not impart much real “sour” flavor. It suits is purpose though.
Cake Diva,
Thanks for the recipe. I do remember seeing it somewhere on this site…I will try it soon. The trivet idea is an interesting one. I have several cast iron and cast iron with enamel trivets that would probably serve the purpose, but I don’t use the parchment sling.
Hi Eric,
Many thanks for the tips on how to make a sourdough starter. I’m now on Day 5 of the process (added 5 1/4 tbsp of flour this morning) and things seem to be happening: it started bubbling immediately and again after I gave it another stir a moment ago.
I have a question, however: after I’ve stirred it, a layer of liquid forms on top of the starter (water and pineapple juice, I imagine). Should I attempt to strain that off before transferring to a glass container (tomorrow’s step)? My starter seems to be have a much runnier consistency than the one in your video (I’m using plain white flour). What should I do? Also, how often and with what quantities should I feed it once I’ve transferred to the glass container and have started actually using the starter to bake with?
Many thanks!
← Previous Comments
Next Comments →
{ 5 trackbacks }