What is a starter?
Think of it as yeast. However, compared with instant dry yeast, it will takes much longer time to properly ferment your dough, or bread. It is the slow ferment timings, over the counter or inside the fridge, that will give your bread all its flavour, nuttiness and tanginess (sourness).
A start is literarily immortal (in the fridge). You could forget your starter pot inside your fridge for months or even a year, and with proper care and feeding (see feeding section) you will still be able to revive / reactivate it to make proper bread loaves.
Why use starter in your sourdough?
The slower the fermentation process, the more flavour it will develop. Be mindful that a starter should be used at its mature (or peak) stage. If you pass that ultimate peak time window, it will start to deflate and turn from sour to very very sour. Your starter could still be used, but with lower ratio starter to flour/water, and it might also affect the bread structure and ovenspring as the bread will ferment way quicker than it should.
How to create and feed your starter?
A starter is nothing more than just flour and water. Most of the recipes you can find online will teach you how to make a starter in just 7 days ... as long as you feed him properly every day or twice a day. In reality it took me months before I could reach a starter mature enough that would yield me a decent starter, and even longer to get a decent loaf.
To create your starter just mix the same ratio flour/water, say equal parts 50g flour with 50g water.
Then every day for the next 7 days you will need to discard half of the previous starter and feed him again with the same ratio, using the 1/1/1 formula. A ratio 1/1/1 of equal parts of old starter, flour, water should be mixed again.
Why discard?
If you were to keep the old starter without discarding, you would end up:
- with more starter than you could ever use
- with a starter that is too sour and too overripe to be used properly into a sourdough bread.
That being said, not everyone is discarding their starters. You can either bake some sour pancakes with it or even bake a bread a day!
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