On your marks, get set, BAKE!
By now you've heard about the dramatic rise in the number of people making bread at home. (sorry, can't resist a good pun). 

Anyone who's tried to buy flour or yeast in the grocery store knows this as well.  You can usually find flour, but perhaps not the brand/type you want.  And yeast is also short supply.  The good news is that yeast is a naturally occurring chemical reaction and you can make your own.  It's a wild yeast.  And the most common way to do this is to make what's called a Sourdough Starter.  To quote the good people at the King Arthur Flour company: 

When flour is mixed with liquid, the friendly bacteria (lactobacilli) and wild yeast in both the flour and your surrounding environment start working together. Within their flour-and-water slurry (now called starter), these tiny living creatures generate byproducts that cause bread to rise and give it complex, rich flavor.

To help you out, we called in a pro:  Jesse, a professional chef and husband to DCFS Project Assistant Kelsey Badger.  He made this bread and you can, too! Warning: this is not for someone out for instant gratification, but since we are all sheltering in place, spending 7-12 days growing some yeast seems totally doable. 

Boule With Slice

How to start a sourdough starter

written by a guy who worked in professional kitchens for 21 years and doesn’t have patience for any hobbyist tom-foolery or pseudo-science.

Before beginning the process of making a sourdough starter, I’d like to dispel some common misconceptions:

●      It doesn’t matter how long you theoretically have had your sourdough starter, it won’t taste any different than a young starter made with the same water and flour in the same place. If you took a 100-year-old starter from San Francisco and brought it to my kitchen om Chicago and fed it with the same water and flour as I feed mine now, they’d molecularly be exactly the same within a few days.

●      Municipal tap water won’t hinder the development of your starter. If it had enough chlorine in it to do that, you shouldn’t be drinking it either.

●      Once it is established, you don’t have to feed your starter every day, or even every week if you don’t want to.

●      You definitely don’t have to name it.

●      Starters are actually really difficult to kill if all you’re ever putting in them is flour and water.

Now that all of that is out of the way, we can begin making a starter.

STEP ONE: Get out your digital scale (if you don’t have a digital scale, stop reading now and go acquire one). Your scale should be accurate to 1 gram and if you get one with a maximum load of 3 kilos, you can use it to measure the bread you’ll eventually be making. Place a 1 quart container with a tight fitting lid on the scale and tare the weight of the container. Add 200 g of warm water (75F if you have an instant read thermometer, just barely warm to the touch if you don’t) then 200 g of either All-Purpose (AP)  or bread flour. Bread flour is preferable due to its higher gluten content, but can be somewhat hard to come by right now, so just use what you can find. Even whole wheat flour and rye will work, but those will somewhat limit the breads you can eventually make. Mix those together with something clean, doesn’t matter what (I personally use wooden chopsticks leftover from Chinese takeout). Place the lid on it and put it in the warmest spot in your house (ideally 70-80F). Now leave it alone for two days.

STEP TWO: After two days, remove the lid from your container. Doesn’t matter what it looks like at this point, but if there are bubbles or foam, that’s a great sign. Place the open container on your scale and tare it, then remove 100 g of starter (hopefully your scale has a negative weight function, most do). Now add 50 g warm water and 50 g of your flour. Mix with something clean, cover, and put it back where it goes.

STEP THREE:  You’re going to repeat the previous step every day for 5-10 more days and you want to do it at roughly the same time every day so try and pick a time to do the first feeding that makes sense with your schedule for the next couple of weeks. As you do this, look at and smell the starter every day: when it is bubbly and giggly and kind of smells yeasty it is probably ready to go. The best way to check is to fill a bowl with cold water and drop your discards for the day into it: if they float readily, ideally with some actually above the surface like an iceberg, you’re ready to start baking bread.

STEP FOUR:  Once the starter is established, you can reduce your feeding percentage to anywhere from 20-40% starter to water and flour by weight (there will be spreadsheets attached to make this easier to calculate). On days when you want to make bread, you’ll need to feed your starter enough to have what you need for the bread and to keep the starter itself going. I usually maintain 75 g of starter at a time as that is a good amount to build up to make one loaf in one feeding. I accomplish this by feeding 25 g of starter with 25 g each warm water and flour. When I want to make bread, I feed all 75 g of this starter (no discards) with 75 g each of warm water and flour. After eight to 10 hours, your starter is ready to make a loaf of sourdough (I’ve attached a recipe) that will use 160 g of starter, leaving you with enough to feed the next day.

If you don’t want to feed your starter every day, feed it as usual then let it sit in a warm spot for four hours before transferring to the fridge. It can stay there without being fed for about six days. When you take it out to feed or build it up to make bread, all you have to do to adjust is to increase the temp of your water. I go with 90F but anything up to 110F would be fine, it’ll just rise faster with warmer water: 90F keeps it pretty close to the same timing as working with 70F water and room temp starter.

Sourdough Feeder Calculator and Recipe files

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Okay, got it?  If you don't, here are some other places to seek advice:

King Arthur Flour Sourdough Baking tips: https://www.kingarthurflour.com/blog/2015/08/11/sourdough-baking-tips 

King Arthur Flour Sourdough Guide: https://www.kingarthurflour.com/learn/guides/sourdough