You have likely heard the terms like natural leavening, wild yeast, and sourdough starter. All of those terms mean the same thing and they are real yeast, which is crucial to making real bread.
In sourdough bread making everything revolves around real yeast that comes from letting a mixture of flour and water naturally ferment. To get it there it is fed flour and water every day for about two weeks until it becomes a living mass of microorganisms that are active and growing.
For centuries, humans used this natural leavening. Then in the mid-1800s, things began to change as bakers looking for easier and faster ways to make bread turned to commercial yeast. But sourdough starter is nothing like the little packets of yeast you buy at the store.
How Does Real Yeast Work?
When you mix flour and water together, it combines with wild yeast and bacteria that are in the air around us, on our hands, and on the grain. The flour and water give them a great place to congregate—like a little condo for wild yeast and bacteria to live, eat, and grow.
This kind of natural yeast needs at least eight hours of fermentation to make bread rise, so this is not anything like fast-acting baker’s yeast. During this time, the wild yeast eats the sugar in the flour which makes carbon dioxide and ethanol. This creates the bubbles that raise the dough and cause the start to become active.
Then the bacteria consume the sugars and starches they also make two liquids—lactic acid and acetic acid. The acetic acid creates the sour flavor and the lactobacilli, which is only found in sourdough bread, breaks down irritants and improves digestion.
Natural yeast and bacteria do amazing things for your digestion and for your bread.
History of Sourdough
Natural leavening probably began in Egypt 5,000 years ago. It is no coincidence that the Egyptians also discovered beer. Sourdough bread is, basically, fermented grain. As the story goes, Egyptians left some wet meal out in the sun and it started to bubble up and ferment. When they baked it, they ended up with a nicely raised loaf, unlike all the flatbread they’d made before.
This start became the first leavening agent. For centuries, humans used this natural leavening. Then in the mid-1800s, things began to change as bakers looked for easier and faster ways to make bread.
After Louis Pasteur proved his theory of germs in 1881 and identified yeast as a natural living organism, companies started making baker’s yeast. Now, what most of us think of as yeast is actually a lab-created product without any wild bacteria.
Until about 20 years ago, the market was dominated completely by baker’s yeast and real sourdough starters were rare. However, these days, we are seeing a comeback of things fermented. That is what sourdough is, a preferment of water, flour, naturally occurring yeasts, and friendly bacteria.
Using a Counter a Starter
Personally, I like to keep a counter start that I feed once a day. I think of it like a pet.
It will remember it when it gets fed and gets used to that schedule. If you change the schedule, it’ll give you a little pushback. That’s okay. Just let it adjust and keep feeding it until it does what you want it to do.
You can get it used to being fed every other day, even every three days without getting mold. But you just have to get into a regular cycle and do it for a while.
An when you need to use it again, just refresh it again before you need to use it.That’s the beautiful thing about a start because if it is over-processed, you just feed it again and wait for it to look like this and it’ll be ready to make whatever you want.
Why a Counter Start?
A counter start is a sweeter start. If you leave it on the counter and you feed eat it once a day to keep it from molding, it will be ready when you need it. But if you feed it once a day without throwing any of it out, you will have like a bathtub full.
So you might ask, why do folks say to throw away cup each time you feed it? I say, “No, no, That just means its time to make pancakes or chocolate cake with it.”
So you do have to take some out just because if you keep feeding it, it will get bigger than you need. But don’t throw it away.
Read our sister blog at Abigail’s Oven for lots of cool things you can bake. Or pick up Melissa Noriss’ Hand Made: The Modern Woman’s Guide to Made-from-Scratch Living. Her chapter on “Culture is filled with recipes for sourdough pancakes, waffles, tortillas, pie crust, white bread, and sandwich bread.
The great thing about her book or Abigail’s Oven blog is your counter starter is ready to use all the time. So instead of throwing it out, make pancakes. In our home, we make muffins or cookies and lots of fun things.
So that’s the benefit of being a counter-start-person.
Refrigerating Starter
If you are not using your starter regularly, you can feed your start and then put it right in the refrigerator. The starter will get used to that and then it’s a little bit less maintenance.
There it will slowly refresh it, because anything cold with a start or the dough is going to not going to stop it. It’s going goning to slow it down. But it will be sourer in the fridge because the cold just brings out the acidic acid more.
If you refresh your start and put it in the fridge, then two days later it will be ready to use. And it will stay ready for several days or a week. It will be cold and it may taste a little bit sourer, but that’s a way you can keep it and also use your start for much longer without feeding it.
Now in the summertime, if your kitchen gets hot, the fridge is the answer. However, that might not be the case if you’re using the start every day.
I never need to keep our start in the fridge here because we use it so often. But in the summertime, we have to refresh it more often because the heat will make it process faster. If not, it can even spoil and get moldy.
At our bakery, Abigail’s Oven, our summer starter schedule is way different than our winter schedule. Right now, we’re feeding it every other day. Unless we’re going to bake, we bake three times a week there, and then we feed it to ramp it activity up. So we feed it every few hours, then every eight, and then it’ll will be ready to use.
Just keep that in mind that the heat makes it process faster and with cold, it is slower.
Other Tips
So you just have to remember that when you are keeping a counter starter, you want to cover it or it will get a crust on the top from the air. If you have crusty stuff, that’s just annoying. So it’s just better to keep it covered.
If you want to be wise do not store your starter in anything metal because it interferes with the bacteria. That’s why you’ll see the old fashioned start containers like this crock.
You can also use a food-grade plastic container. But I really like using a glass jar with a metal lid. However, make sure it’s not going to go up to touch the top when you feed it. Never put it in a container more than halfway full because it’s going to double in size.
And do not us a tight lid, (which might be a fun experiment to do at home). I wonder if the lid would bend or if the jar would crack it? I don’t know what it would do. But the gasses inside are a pretty strong force when it gets raised. It would be a force to react with.
Care and Feeding of Starter
All right, so let’s talk about measurements. Your start needs to be fed equal parts flour and filtered pure water. One way to feed it is to weigh out equal ingredients. And the second is to measure them out.
With a kitchen scale weighing would be easy. You could add 180 grams of water and 180 grams of flour, equal parts. But if you you don’t have a scale you could add about ¾ cup of water to 1¼ cups of flour. Either way, you will need to mix the water and flour until there are no dry parts left.
That’s it and of course, you will have to wait for 4 hours for it to get bubbly and active. Then it will be ready to use and it will probably stay active for 4 more hours. After that, it will need to be fed again or put in the fridge.
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