How To Make Sourdough Starter - So Easy!

Ciao bessie! Hi guys! Okay, thank you Amore. How do you come out from there? Nothing. What are we talking about today Amore? Today we are talking about sourdough starter Sourdough? Sourdough. Okay. In the last video we showed you guys how we make our sourdough bread and we said we would show you how we make sourdough starter in this video. Okay. You miss your hat. I go to my position. So, how are you doing this? So, the sourdough starter is actually a pretty lengthy process and a lot of people get intimidated because they say, oh my gosh, I have to wait at least a week to make this before I can even start making bread. Guys, it's worth it. So not only can you make bread with this, but you can use your sourdough starter to make English muffins, pizza dough, cinnamon rolls, crackers. You can use it for so many baked goods. Lemon loaf. Oh, or even the pancakes. Oh, the pancakes was the best. So this thing can give you so much and you can really keep this going for years and years and years. I know some people who have their sourdough that they've had for 10 years and you can even find some from certain bakeries across the world that are like hundreds of years old. So once you start this and you get through the first week, you don't have to do any of this craziness anymore and you can keep this going and going and going for years and enjoy amazing sourdough recipes. So, let's do the hard part and make the sourdough starter. Perfect! Alright guys, so what are your ingredients? You really only need two things. Flour and water. You can use a lot of different kinds of flour. I know people who make their sourdough starter with whole wheat or rye, bread flour. I like to just do old-fashioned all-purpose flour for mine and filtered water. You also need a container. Always pick a glass container. A mason jar works great. I found this little cute jar at Goodwill, so I used this. Today we're going to use this vase to make it and you need something to just kind of loosely cover on top during the process. And of course the Italian spoon! But you need to fix that hat. What's wrong with my hat? The Italian flag starts with the green to the left. So now you look like... Well, we need to complain to whoever made this hat because when you flip it around that way you have the back in the front and it looks sloppy. That probably is not Italian. There we go. Now you are in. The other thing we're going to use is a scale like we did for our baking. Yeah, Jesse is a scale. I'm an eye person. So we're going to use this, but here we go. This is what we're going to do. So your sourdough recipe for the starter consists of seven days minimum of steps. I'm going to list them all down in the description for you, so don't worry. Follow along with the video, but you also have that information down there. So day one, this is what we're going to do. You always want to measure your container and see how heavy it is. This one is 403 grams, so write that down. So write it down somewhere so it's easy for you to remember. It's going to help you calculate in the future when you're adding things and discarding your sourdough starter every day. So that's important to know. Now, we're going to add 100 grams of flour to the base. So you don't put zero on the scale? Oh yeah. Sorry. I forgot. Good job, that's why you're here. I keep you around for something. I'm the director. Remember, I know. Tear the scale to zero. Tear the scale. We're going to do 100 grams. We need that on video. We need that to go down in the history of this channel. Thank you. You're so lucky. I did it by eye. So you have your 100 grams of flour. You can tear again. Yes. 125 grams of filtered water. What is it? 26. Darn. Okay. Whatever. Wooden spoon. I like to use a wooden spoon or you can use a silicone spatula to scrape the sides. Don't use metal because sometimes it can react with what we're doing here. The idea of this is replacing your traditional yeast in your recipes because this, what it does is it captures wild yeast in your environment. By doing this, the yeast feed on this water and flour mixture and develop a little colony inside the vase which is what you're keeping alive during this process. Stir it up and make sure you incorporate all the little dry pieces of flour. Make it nice and smooth. Try not to get a bunch of lumps in there. Scrape down the sides and what you're going to do is you're going to leave this in a warm, dark place for 24 hours. So it's pretty easy. You just put flour in water and then you leave there for 24 hours. I know. So you think it's a week long process but you're really only doing 5 minutes of work every day and letting this do all the work for 24 hours and then another 24 hours as you go through the week. So, I have a question. In Europe, it is better because we don't use the air conditioner so the warm raise the thing? That is the thing? Yeah, I mean, your temperature of your environment makes a big difference. Alessio has become an American and likes to keep the house cold. It's not true. So it keeps our starter from growing very fast. It's not true. If you have a warm environment, like say, I would say 80 degrees is the ideal environment. A trick that you can do if you want to speed it up a little bit is you can put this in the oven turned off, but turn the light on in the oven and let that sit for a couple of hours and keep it in the oven because the light kind of heats up the oven environment and can make it go faster. Yeah, but another thing, it is much better in Europe because better water and better air? I think so. Yeah, it is. I mean, I think ours tastes pretty good. Ours tastes really good, but I will say it does have to do a lot with your water and your flour and that's why different sourdoughs taste different in different areas. So some things to remember. You probably won't see a lot of activity going on in your starter for the first few days, sometimes several days. Don't worry, just keep at it and eventually you'll start to see that bubble and that fermentation. As you can see, mine is a mature starter that I've been going for a while now. I just fed this a couple of hours ago, so it hasn't done its full rise yet, but you can see, hopefully, on the side, all those bubbles and things. Can you see that? Yes. So you can probably even see on the top too, how it's starting to get some bubbles popping up at the top and this is just after two hours. Yes. So eventually you're going to want something active and really mature like this, but it probably won't look like that at the beginning and that's fine. You have to grow the colony of yeast. Another thing to remember is the ugly truth about creating a sourdough starter and that is the daily discard. A lot of people absolutely hate this. I had a lot of problems with mine too because I felt like I was wasting things. So what I did is every day when I discarded from the sourdough starter, which discard is like you'll remove a piece of it every day, to keep it in check because if you don't discard and you just keep adding and adding and adding, you're going to get a lot of mixture. So you discard to get a little bit out there, add in there, feed that and it grows and matures faster because there's a lot to feed on for that little colony. So when I discard, I keep some of mine in the refrigerator and I use it to make pancakes, I use it in our compost. There's a lot of recipes out there that you can find for sourdough starter discard so you can use that and feel like you're not wasting when you just throw it away. Some people just throw it away and that's fine too. Let's go ahead and show you guys what you'll do on day 2 and day 3. The steps for day 2 and 3 are the same. So let's just imagine that we're 24 hours from now and let's do it. So what you're going to do is you're going to have your sourdough starter that's been sitting there for 24 hours. You're going to turn on your scale and you're going to discard, so you're going to remove down to 75 grams. And this is why it's important to have the measurement of this because now you have something inside of it. So you have to know how much this weighs in order to get an accurate measurement of what starter is left over. So you're going to put it on there. 623 grams. So we know that this was 403, right? So we're going to get down to 75. Let me check my recipe. 75 grams, so that's going to give us about 470. I used to have the recipe I see from the camera. Steal America. I'm sending you accurate information to the people. 475 or 78 grams we need left in this. So we're going to discard. So what you're going to do is you're going to reach down in there and you're going to discard some of it. You discard, which you remove sourdough starter down to 75 grams. This is what 75 grams looks like in here. Nothing. Very very little. So after that you're going to add another 100 grams of flour. Okay. And 115 grams of water. Tear the scale. We got another 100 grams of flour. Now we're going to add 115 grams of water. Filtered water. We add the water. And stir it up again. Okay. And this is the process day 2 and day 3. After you do this, after you stir it all together you're going to leave it again for another 24 hours. And when you come back on the third day, you're going to do this again cover it, set it aside, and leave it for 24 hours. What is day 4? Day 4 is where you're going to start doing feedings which is what you call this, 2 times a day. So every 12 hours. So what you're going to do is on day 4, you're going to discard down to 75 grams again, add 100 grams of flour, 115 grams of water, and then you're going to wait 12 hours. After 12 hours, you're going to do the same thing. Discard down to 75 add 100 grams of flour, 115 grams of water and wait another 12 hours. And that same thing so the double feedings are going to happen on day 4, day 5, and day 6. And I know this sounds a little complicated, but remember we're going to write it all down in the description box for you guys. So, you don't have to remember it all right now. After day 6, day 7, you're going to discard down to 50 grams. So it's going to look like there's barely anything in there. Don't panic. You're going to add 100 grams of flour and 100 grams of filtered water, stir it up, leave it for 12 hours, and then same thing 50 grams, 100 grams, 100 grams. Now, don't panic if at this point you haven't seen a lot of bubbling activity. Sometimes you might, depending on how warm your environment is, and sometimes you don't. When I made mine, I didn't see a lot of bubbles, and I started to panic a little bit. I thought, oh my gosh, why isn't this working? I kept at it. On day 9 is when I ended up finding my bubbly activity like this. Okay, we explained like before, but we're going to show again. Okay, that is the bubbly situation. Another thing to remember is probably on day 3 or 4, you might see that bubbling activity start to get going. You might get really excited, and then it'll just stop. It's not dead. Nothing is wrong. Sometimes it just slows down a little bit before it picks back up again. So if you see the bubbles and then they go away, don't worry. Just keep going and then eventually you'll get this. On day 9, I swear, I didn't have any bubbling activity and I thought, what am I doing wrong? Maybe it's not warm enough. Maybe I'm mixing it wrong. On day 9, it shot up the vase out of nowhere. I just went in that morning and it had tripled in volume out of nowhere. So just keep going. Let the thing mature. Get feedings regularly and keep going like that. You'll get a bubbly mature starter like this. When you start to see this and it's doubling or even tripling in volume after feeding, it might take 4 hours. It might take 12 hours. Again, it depends on your environment. For me, it probably will double in about 6 or so hours after feeding it. And that's when you want to use it for your recipe. Floating test that we did the last time, remember? Where you put a little bit in water and if it floats, it means it's nice and bubbly and good for baking. And then you can see our video from the bread, how we make the bread. So over there we explain how to use it too. After you get it mature, you can leave it on the counter and feed it every day if you're going to be making a lot of different recipes. Or if you're just going to be baking once a week, you can put it in a sealed container in the refrigerator and when you're ready to use it, you can bring it out and you can do your feeding, get it activated again and use it. It's like you make him to sleep and then you bring out so you don't need to always bake every day. You can always use it later. A couple other things to mention. They're pretty sturdy little guys. Like some people might leave it in there for a year and never feed it in the refrigerator and then they'll bring it out. It might take some time to get it activated again, but it's not dead. You just have to get it started. Sometimes I leave mine out daily. I feed every day. Sometimes I put it in the refrigerator. It just depends. I will say too, after a week, the first time I made this starter, I had a little bit of craziness happen. I forgot to feed it for 36 hours and I came in and I saw it had a crust on top and it had little pieces of white and I thought, oh my gosh, is it mold? What's going on? I didn't panic. I just took off the top layer, threw it out, used the bottom layer, fed that and it just picked up immediately and it was okay. You might also notice that dough smell, that flour smell, sour. That's the smell you're going for. If you've had sourdough bread, you'll recognize it when you smell it. If you smell something that smells like rubbing alcohol or nail polish remover, it's okay. It just means your sourdough starter is hungry. It just gives off that smell. It's a pretty sharp smell, but you'll know, oh, I need to feed it. And sometimes when you take it out of the refrigerator after being in there for a while, it'll have that smell. You just need to feed it and it'll go away. The other thing is it might develop a clear liquid on the top. Some people discard that liquid. Some people stir it in. I stir it in, but again, it means your sourdough starter is hungry. So some little tips and tricks that I've learned in the sourdough baking process. All the benefits about this sourdough? Well, it's a fermented food number one, so if you have problems digesting gluten in bread, doing sourdough can really help make it easier on your digestive system. I also think that it just works better in recipes than active dry yeast. When I make the same recipe using the dry yeast or this, it just gives a stronger, more developed flavor and better rise to the bread or the dough whatever you're baking. I think it's also just kind of fun. Because honestly, it's like a very traditional way of making lemon bread and it makes me feel like I'm in Europe baking bread. So it's just kind of fun. And you can gift this to people who may not want to make their own starter. If you have active starter, you can put it in a little jar and give it to them and they can immediately jump off and start making their bread too. So it's a really fun gift idea. Yeah, for even for your mom or your grandmother and then she's going to be so happy. Yeah, it's a little unique gift that you can give. So again, once you get this going, you don't have to do all the discards, you don't have to do all that upkeep, and you can keep it for years. Somebody has 300 years, guys. I know, it's crazy. So there you go, guys. I hope that this helps you on your sourdough starter journey. Again, description for all the steps by day. And check out the sourdough bread recipe if you didn't see it already to see how we use this guy in action. Ciao! Bye! So you're going to make pizza? Yeah. You smell the sourdough starter. Does it smell good though? It smells like the bread, right? It smells like bread. Wow. This is cool.