My Easy (& Unorthodox) Sourdough Routine

My Easy (And Unorthodox) Sourdough Routine:

Eating real, whole food should be easy.  I fear that us species of the human race severely over complicate every aspect of life.  See what I did there? I even over complicated that statement just to prove my point.  I’m here to tell you how I’ve minimized my sourdough routine over the past year of having it.  Also, let it be said here that I am talking about making a loaf of sandwich bread, sweet pastry dough, or anything of the likes.  I am not talking about artisan crusty loaves. 

When you’re first learning sourdough, I’ve come to know a few personality types: 

• The purist- the person who treats sourdough like a first born child.  Everything has to be perfect, and everything has to be right. 
• The realist- the person who realizes that they own the sourdough, and not the other way around.  This person probably has a lot of balls they’re trying to juggle, so they find easy ways to take care of the starter without sacrificing too much of their precious time on it.  
• The negligent- the person who has great intentions to do this thing, yet the most they can remember to commit to is to feed it once a week and pop it in the fridge and bake bread once every 3 months. 

First off, which one do you think I am? I’ll give you a hint, I aim to make slow living attainable for every human in the modern world (including me!).  If you guess the realist, you’re correct.  I’d like to break down my feeding routine below, and how I switched from being something closer to the perfectionist to becoming the realist.  

So, let’s be real.  I have 2 kids that I homeschool, a house, 3 cats, a few side hustles, am committed to eating whole foods made in my kitchen, and would like to be able to visit friends and family, all while enjoying everything this world has to offer, nature, food, culture, books, and forming new and meaningful relationships at church. There was no way I could do ALL THAT and remember to work out, take my supplements, eat consistently throughout the day, pay attention to my kids’ needs, my husband’s needs, and my needs, and still feed my starter (who is named Samantha) every single day.

When you first learn to take care of your sourdough, here are the basic rules: feed your starter with equal parts starter, flour and lukewarm water.  Some people tell you to feed it 2x a day and some only once.  Some people tell you to put it in a jar with a breathable cotton or linen cloth on top with a rubber band.  Some tell you to put in a swing-top jar.  Some people tell you to kiss it goodnight every night (just kidding, but not too far off from the truth).  I could continue this list, but I’m not here to criticize every person who has ever tried to follow the sourdough rules.  I’m here to simplify it.  

Here are the rules I think we can all break:

1. You do not need to feed your sourdough perfectly equal gram measurements of starter, flour, or water. 
2. You do not need to use lukewarm water. 
3. You do not need to feed your starter 2x a day, you don’t even need to feed it once a day! (gasp!!!)
4. It doesn’t matter which jar you choose. 

So here is the realistic, logical breakdown of feeding my starter:

• I try to feed my starter once every 2 days, but sometimes I’ve even stretched it to 4 days.  3 days is probably where I land most often. I find that a starter that is used to being fed on a realistic schedule, gets used to being fed this way and becomes more resilient in general. I have no science explanation for it, and maybe the purists will have my head for it, but it’s an anecdotal truth.  “But, Robin, aren’t you worried it will starve or grow mold on it?” Not really.  Once you get familiar with what hooch is (the gray-ish liquid on top of your starter) you will be a little less worried. And as for starving, that will just mean when you make bread, it will be even happier to have food! If I am making bread (which i do 1-2 times a week, but usually just once a week) I try to feed it at least the night before, or the morning of, the day I will start the process. (For example: if I am going to start the process on Sunday evening, I would feed Samantha on Saturday evening, or Sunday morning, it just depends when I actually have the time to do it.)
• When I do feed my starter, I usually use my scale, but sometimes if it’s a rather busy day, and I need to just get this done because Samantha has been starving for 3 days, I will just do the bare minimum.  Now I know doing the bare minimum gets a bad rep, and I agree, we should strive to try hard, but on things that matter! Such as, treating our children with respect, or packing up our husbands lunch with a sweet little love note, or bringing food to a family member or friend in need of such a convenience.  But feeding my starter? That’s highly unnecessary to strive for perfection there.  I just need her around to provide my family with wholesome, probiotic-rich, virtually gluten free bread. That’s all.  I’m not entering her into a county fair for the most well-kept sourdough starter in the district. “So how do you know how much to feed it?” Once you’re well accustomed to bread making, you know what the starter should look and feel like once you’ve fed it it’s proper amount.  If you have an extra hungry starter, I recommend feeding it a little extra flour and water, so that it will have plenty to survive off of for the next few days.  
• You can use cold water, straight out of your water filter.  Trust me on this.  There is no need to warm up water for feedings.  For bread making? Of course! I have experimented with using cold milk and water for making sourdough buns, and sadly, the all purpose flour buns weren’t very happy about that.  My fresh milled buns were fine, but that starter is also getting a lot of extra nutrients and vitamins since the flour is freshly milled.  
• And as for the jar debate, I experimented with two starters, Samantha and Whole-wheat Whitney.  Samantha is fed with all-purpose organic flour, and Whitney is fed with whole grain flour.  I’ve still got a few bags of already ground whole wheat flour, so sometimes I feed her that, but sometimes I feed her the freshly milled wheat from my Mockmill.  Samantha is in a swing-top jar and Whitney is in a quart mason jar with a piece of linen and a rubberband on top.  The difference? Not much. They are both happy starters, with bubbles galore, ready to bake me some delicious bread.  I will state here that Whitney is 1,000x happier than any fermentation experiment I have in my kitchen when I feed her freshly milled grains, but that’s a story for another time.  
• You don’t need two separate starters, to feed different flours to. Sure you can experiment, like I said I did above, but it is completely unnecessary and just an extra burden, plus not to mention all the extra discard you end up with in the fridge. Just feed your starter at 100% hydration and see which flours make it happiest! I am trying to transition my kitchen to using only sourdough & fresh milled flour together for all my breads. But for now, my starter gets fed all the leftover flours we have in the pantry!

Now, when you go to bake bread, there’s a few simple rules I’d like to impart: 

1. Feed your starter either the night before or the morning of baking bread if it’s been a relatively long stretch since feeding.  I go by- more than 2 days (so 3 or 4 days without feeding).  If it’s only been 2 days since I’ve fed my starters then I will just move onto the bread baking, with no further feeding required.  Why? Because a hungry (not starving!) starter will make a great loaf.  Essentially, you’re feeding the starter when you give it all the flour and water to make the loaf.  However, you don’t want your starter too-too hungry while making a loaf because the last thing we want is another obstacle or wasting all that precious hard work or hard-earned money spent on ingredients.  This is slow living, after all, which means we’re intentional about how we spend our time and money, because the two go hand-in-hand. 
2. Don’t take it so seriously.  If you mess up, you mess up. And your family either has to eat a subpar loaf for a week, or you’ve wasted your time and money, and sometimes that does happen despite our efforts.  At the least, you’ve learned something- what not to do.  That’s how I always look at my failures.  

I hope that was helpful, and thorough, without taking too much time from your life.  Please feel free to comment below with how you’ve simplified your sourdough routine or with any new ideas I’ve mentioned that you look forward to implementing!