welcome friends today we are going to take a little bit of a closer look at
sourdough starters a few weeks ago I made a video about how to create and
cultivate your own sourdough starter for use at home and I realized that there
are a lot of questions about that method and there's a lot of conflicting
information in general about sourdough starters not every recipe specifies what
kind of sourdough starter to use what the hydration level should be and there
are two schools of thought about creating and feeding and we're keeping a
sourdough starter alive now I am someone who advocates that if you are baking you
should be using a scale you should be weighing your ingredients but when I
showed you making this sourdough starter I used measuring cups and did everything
by volume and here's why forty some years ago when I was taught
to make my first sourdough starter we had a neighbor when I was growing up who
was from Austria and he was a master bed a master bread baker had an amazing shop
in Toronto did booming business his breads and pastries and everything else
were just off the charts fantastic he taught me how to make a sourdough
starter because I wanted to learn how to make bread and he showed me by volume
and so that's just the way I've always done it and he taught me that of all of
the things where you need to be precise the starter wasn't necessarily the one
area that you needed to be super precise about that this was the art form this
was that that wild card that you needed to learn how to tame and use and sight
and smell and touch were more important in bread baking than scales and exact
measurements and flowcharts and you know spreadsheets and all of that stuff it's
more of an art form and it's about learn the touch smell and see when you're
baking so I've always done it that way and I've always continued doing it that
way and so I call this a hundred percent starter because that's what he called it
and that's what I learned but I know that for those people who love
spreadsheets love flowcharts love exact measurements this isn't a hundred
percent hydration this is actually closer to one hundred and twenty two
percent hydration which means there's slightly more water than flour and what
does that mean in the grander scheme thinks absolutely nothing I've spoken to
a lot of professional Baker's over the last couple of weeks just to make sure
that I had a real good handle on this and I and I knew what I was talking
about and they all said over the course of the year they're 100 percent
hydration starter will actually fluctuate anywhere from 90 to 110 or 115
and at 122 as long as you sort of get a feel for the bread it's gonna be fine
so for those of you that want to make stuff on a scale then of course you do a
one-to-one flour to water based on weight for those of you that want to use
it as an art form it's one-to-one based on volume and you stir it and you smell
it and you know what it's going to be you know what its health is and you
might use a little bit of less water at certain points and you might add more
water at certain points which leads me to this one this is a what I call a 50%
hydration it's actually 61 or 62 percent because again I do it by volume rather
than weight and this is a stiffer starter that you use for certain breads
now the problem is of course when I look at a lot of bread recipes they just say
starter they don't specify whether it's this sort of lacks fluid starter that is
100 percent hydration or this much stiffer one and I'll show you
so the stiff one is definitely stiff it's you know it's a levan it's like
bread dough completely like bread dough whereas this one
is much more like pancake batter and so for a lot of sourdough bread baking the
trickiest part is deciphering isn't a stiff or 50% hydration levan sourdough
starter whatever you want to call this there are proper names for it but it
sort of gets muddy out there people use words interchangeably that probably they
shouldn't or is it this 100% hydration version and that difference in hydration
can really make or break the bread you're baking so you have to be careful
and so here's a choice that you need to make which school of bread baking are
you going to follow and I think I believe that right up front at the very
beginning when you're first starting out you probably should be the spreadsheet
kind you probably should use a scale you probably should weigh everything until
you sort of get the flow and then you understand what this should feel like
and how it works and how it works in the bread you know four or five months in
you're just going to be eyeballing it you're not gonna be measuring anymore
you're not gonna be weighing anymore you're just gonna be making it on the
fly so at the beginning by all means weigh it then you're gonna switch over
and it's going to become an art for you and it really is an art form so where
was I going with that if you're trying to make a sourdough starter look at all
of the information that's available to you and just understand that there are
two schools of thought and that conflicting information really isn't in
conflict it's just people who are tightly regulated and people that are
artsy fartsy and are just sort of like yeah you know it'll all work out and you
know what the truth is somewhere in the middle but I have found that it'll all
work out thanks for stopping by see you again soon