Hey guys it's Bettie from BakerBettie.com! If you aren't familiar with me I am a
trained chef and baking instructor and my goal is to help you become a better
Baker through teaching classic baking techniques and approachable baking
science. Now today is the start of our sourdough series and in this series I'm
going to walk you through step-by-step how to make a sourdough starter, how to
maintain your starter, and most importantly, how to bake with it. Now
there is a ton of amazing information out there about sourdough but it can all
get really confusing and overwhelming so my goal with this series is to keep it
as simple as possible for the home baker. Now the playlist for this series is
meant to be watched sequentially so you can get a good foundational
understanding of how sourdough works. Now before we get started actually
making our sourdough starter let's talk about yeast. So yeast is a fungus and it
is all around us. It is floating through the air, it is living in our bodies, and
it's in a lot of food that we eat. now yeast bread is traditionally made in two
different forms: it can be made with commercially produced yeast or it can be
made with a sourdough starter. now commercially produced yeast is typically
sold dried, you might be familiar with it being sold in packets like this, and it
is cultivated in a lab specifically for its ability to work very quickly to
leaven our bread. now a sourdough starter is a natural
culture of yeast and bacteria that is used to leaven your bread. there are many
different methods of creating a sourdough starter but they all generally
consist of combining flour and water and letting that ferment.
there are natural yeast and bacteria living in flour as well as in the air
and when these are combined with water they're going to start fermenting. now as
you feed your starter over and over again it's going to get stronger as it
collects more yeast and bacteria and it will get strong enough that it can start
a leavening bread. now this is my sourdough starter her name is Millie and
you might be able to see that there's a few bubbles forming in her and that's
because I just fed her a little bit of go and she's starting to feed and
creating co2 gases and alcohols. now we're going to get into all of the
intricate details of how you can start your own starter from scratch in an
upcoming video so be thinking about what you want to name yours.
now you might be wondering what is the benefit in creating your own sourdough
starter if it's so easy to bake bread with a package of yeast? and there are a
few different reasons but the main reason is flavor. so bread made with
commercial yeast is going to contain one strain of yeast and while this yeast
works very quickly and efficiently to leaven your bread it is going to create
less flavor. Bread made from a natural sourdough culture is going to contain
many different strains of yeast and bacteria and it's also going to ferment
over a longer period of time and these things just create a much more flavorful
bread. additionally many people prefer bread made with sourdough starter over
commercially produced bread because they find it easier to digest and the last
and most important reason is that making sourdough is just so dang fun there is
something really magical about just mixing water and flour together and then
using it to make something like this. please leave me any questions you have
down in the comment section and I'll be happy to answer them and in an upcoming
video I will be reviewing all of the equipment that you need to make your own
sourdough and then we're going to dive right into making our own sourdough
starters from scratch. I hope you liked today's video if you did please give it
a like and make sure you subscribe and hit that subscription bell. I'll see you
guys later!