Golden Sourdough Waffles - Easy Sourdough Starter Recipe! (2024)

FAQs

What is the best flour to feed sourdough starter? ›

All-Purpose Flour: All-purpose flour, which is a blend of hard and soft wheat, is a popular choice for feeding sourdough starter. It provides a good balance of protein and starch, which promotes a healthy fermentation process. Bread Flour: Bread flour has a higher protein content compared to all-purpose flour.

Tips For Making Sourdough Starter

Use all-purpose flour to keep a healthy starter. Place the starter in a container with a consistent room temperature of 70°F to 75°F.

I keep 1 ounce of starter and feed it with 1 ounce of flour and 1 ounce of water because I rarely need a massive amount of starter on hand, but various other sourdough luminaries advise different amounts. If you don't have a scale, go for 1/4 cup starter to 1/2 cup of flour to 1/4 cup water.

With each sourdough starter feeding, you'll be discarding some to avoid it from becoming overly acidic. Most will compost or trash this discard, but you can save it and use it in other recipes!

Premature discarding and overfeeding will weaken your starter and elongate the process. Don't discard and re-feed a weak starter before it shows increasing bubble activity or height from the previous feeding. If you don't see more bubbles or a faster rise each day, skip a feeding, and give it more time.

*If making sourdough is new for you, do not be discouraged if you starter takes longer to get active than mine – stick with it, it will happen! *Tap water is usually fine, if you are not sure, use boiled and cooled water, you can use it at room temperature or cool; do not use distilled water.

When you overfeed a sourdough starter you dilute the natural population of yeast and bacteria, making your sourdough culture weak and inactive. However, unlike not feeding it at all, your starter will not die from overfeeding. With a little love, your sourdough starter can recover from being overfed.

What Flour Should I Be Feeding My Sourdough Starter With? You can feed your sourdough starter with any flour you like, as long as it provides the starches the wild yeast in your sourdough starter need to convert to Co2 to rise your dough. The flour you choose should always be unbleached flour.

Unbleached All-Purpose Flour: All-purpose flour is admittedly a broad category, but it's a popular option for sourdough starters due to its wide availability.

If your starter is well past peak (a few hours) and visibly falling, you can give it a “refresh” feeding to reactivate it.

How long should sourdough starter sit before using? ›

Allow to sit of for 4-12 hours before using in a recipe, once it has about doubled in volume. If not using for baking, feed about 12-24 hours after last feeding or place in the fridge.

Generally a starter can stay at room temperature without feeding for a maximum of 3 days. After that you will need to give the starter few feedings before you can use it again. This is because it will become less strong and it will need time and food to become strong again.

If you didn't discard a portion of your starter each time you feed it, two things would happen: Your starter would grow to an enormous, unmanageable size. Your starter would likely become more and more inhospitable to the bacteria and yeast we want as the mixture would become ever more acidic.

Remember, you can't use the discard from your homemade sourdough starter for the first 7 days. You can use sourdough discard in all kinds of sourdough discard recipes, including these no wait sourdough recipes, overnight sourdough discard recipes and sourdough discard recipes that use up a lot of discard.

Store your discard in a jar in the refrigerator where it will continue to ferment, albeit very slowly, whereas at room temperature, it will ferment quickly and you will soon have very ripe discard on your hands that won't be useful for much of anything. You can also store your discard in the freezer.

Whole wheat and rye flours provide more nutrients for your starter and ferment more actively, but working with rye flour makes starter maintenance easier than whole wheat. Rye provides increased fiber and nutrients similar to whole wheat flour, but because of its lower gluten amount it's much easier to stir.

Whole wheat flour is high in protein because it contains the entire wheat berry, including the bran, endosperm, and germ. Bran is naturally high in protein. Typically, whole wheat flour protein percentages range from 13% to 15% or higher. (For reference, King Arthur Baking Whole Wheat Flour is 14% protein.)

Using high-protein white flour (13-14% protein) in your sourdough pizza dough can lead to a chewier pizza. If you'd like to reduce the chewiness, try using a lower protein flour for the pizza dough (like all-purpose flour or Type 00 with lower protein).

Rice flour is the best flour to dust the banneton with prior to adding your dough. It's best not to use all purpose flour at all for this job.