How to Make Your Very Own Sourdough Starter

Super-Simple Sourdough Starter

I was first introduced to sourdough in the summer of 2007. My mother in-law had taken a class at the community rec center and she couldn't have been more excited. We were all a little skeptical about the strange goop she had growing in the kitchen (and how much baking gear she'd grabbed off of Amazon...) but she was so excited that we kept our reservations to ourselves.

That was lucky, as it turns out, because if we'd discouraged her it would have been a major loss - her bread was AMAZING! Her first try out the gate! She moved on to boules of all shapes and sizes, rolls, and even an unbelieveably tasty sourdough thin-crust for pizza.

I was blown away. Could it really be this easy for a total novice to make delicious bread?

It can, and it is - a good starter is the secret to making delicious bread at home, and you can make sourdough starter of your own with a few dirt-cheap ingredients and a couple minutes a day.

In fact, I'd argue that sourdough bread starter is SO powerful that your first loaf will be tastier than any of the bland dry yeast, no-knead, instant sourdough recipes we've all clipped out of the newspaper.

It's practically idiot proof. I know this...because I am an idiot, and my sourdough kicks butt!

You're going to need to pull together a couple of cheap, but kind of odd ingredients. The hardest one to find will be pure pineapple juice - it's really, really important that you don't get one with added ingredients. Any extra acids, sweeteners, or preservatives will keep your sourdough starter from ever taking off, and on the other hand, extra sug

Next, you just need to grab some all-purpose flour and patience!

Here are the measurements I typically recommend

1. 16 oz. raw or unsweetened pineapple juice
2. 1 lb. whole wheat flour (nothing special here - the quality matters more later)
3. A bottle of purified water (tap water won't work most places)

And here are instructions for my simple bread starter recipe:

1. Start with about a quarter cup of pineapple juice in a tupperware container and stir in a few tablespoons of whole wheat flour. I like to do this half a tablespoon at a time until the mixture reaches the desired consistency. What consistency is that? Let's call it “wet dough” - not tacky, but not soupy either.
2. Throw a clean dish towel over the top instead of a lid and put it in a dark cupboard for a couple of days. This is the most important part in the process - the starter needs to breathe, so make sure you don't seal the container and stir it at least twice a day to introduce air evenly into the mixture.
3. On the third day, you're going to want to give your starter it's first “feeding” - you'll get intimately familiar with this  once you have a full-grown starter -  which just means adding a couple more tablespoons of flour to the mix. Since your starter is still young, though, add in an equal amount of apple juice as well, to give the bacteria extra sugar to really bloom.
4. Put your starter back in the cupboard under its towel, and make sure you keep stirring it a few times a day to mix stuff up - this is the phase where there's probably a bit of the tasty bacteria in there, and you want to make sure you've got air, sugar, and flour mixed in evenly for the wee beasties to grow!
5. After two more days of waiting, you should start seeing bubbles and getting a sweet & sour smell from your starter. It will probably start getting puffy at this point too! These are all great signs.
6. Time for its first REAL feeding! You're going to want to give it flour and water at a 2-1 ratio, so 2-3 tablespoons of water for 4-6 tablespoons of flour. Decide how much to add based on the consistency of your starter - if it's still pretty thick, I'd only add a bit so it has more time to age. If it's wet and bubbly, add more! Your starter is ready and raring to go!
7. Rest it for another day or two to really get going, especially if your starter seems to be starting slowly. If it's winter time, it's going to take longer than usual. If it's summer, this might all happen extra-fast.
8. Congrats! You've grown your own healthy, happy sourdough starter. Keep adding flour and water at around a 2-1 ratio, trying to maintain that nice wet-dough consistency, until you've got enough to make your own bread!

Now, there are a lot of places where you can buy a commercial sourdough starter online. Personally, I feel like this is expensive and unnecessary, and I really appreciate knowing 100% what ingredients are going into my starter.

Additionally, I think that making a starter is an excellent introduction to the kind of skills (very basic skills...) that you're going to need to keep your starter fat, happy, and to grow it into a big enough culture to make yourself some bread. In fact, considering how many people accidentally contaminate or spill their starter later on, it's nice to know that you have the basic process down so that you don't have to worry about it, and know how cheap and easy it is to make yourself another.

Plus, DON'T BELIEVE ANYONE who tries to charge you an arm and a leg for some famous strain of sourdough starter. I'm not saying that these are a scam - I believe they send you what they're selling you - but the truth about sourdough is that it changes rapidly to become accustomed to the place that it's living in.

Even if you were able to get the sourdough starter shipped from your favorite bakery or pizza place, there's no way that it would keep that same taste unless you happened to live just down the block. Usually, people are buying these from a favorite shop they've moved away from, and as the local bacteria get into your starter, the taste will naturally change to reflect where you live. At this point, my starter's got strains from New York, Los Angeles, AND Washington DC! But that doesn't mean the flavor will stay the same.

In fact, there a whole plethora of other factors that affect the way that your breads will turn out that have nothing to do with the starter you use. People have sworn for years that the reason New York bagels are the best in the world is a result of the quality of Manhattan's water supply. And the secret behind the unique taste of San Francisco sourdough is actually a unique strain of yeast that's native to that area.

If you miss your favorite pizza spot, there's a pretty good chance that the unique flavor you're missing is actually a result of the pizza oven they used! And those aren't the kind of things that you're ever going to replicate at home.

Instead, try to focus on the unique, special nature of your own starter, and appreciate how it reflects the qualities of YOUR home! It's a very special experience making a food that's infused with the flora of your own hometown, and soon your own friends and relatives will wonder what your secret sourdough recipe is, and want to take a bit of your starter home with them :)

They'll never figure out your secret, though, and we can only hope they'll learn to love the bread that they bake as much as you'll love yours.

A couple of notes on water

• A lot of recipes you'll find online call for warm water. You'll notice I didn't use that here. Why? It's not necessary unless you're using active dry yeast. That's important to activate the packaged stuff, but this method relies on attracting and cultivating wild yeast, which doesn't need warm water to grow. Room temperature is fine.


• There seems to be a lot of concern about what type of water to use. Distilled water, spring water, filtered water, and bottled water are all fine - although some of them are unnecessary and can get expensive. All you need to know is that the real enemy is chlorinated water, since it prevents the growth of the tasty bacterias we're specifically trying to encourage here. You can even use tap water, though, if you're patient enough to let it sit on the counter for a day or two so the chlorine can evaporate.

My sourdough bread recipe

Ok, I'm getting a lot of emails about my recipe, so I'll post it here soon. But be warned: bread baking is more of an art than a science, so this'll take some experimenting.