Feeding Your Sourdough Starter

The secret to making good bread is down to maintaining a healthy and vibrant starter. If your starter is lifeless, your bread will turn out the same. Think of it as the foundation on which to build your sourdough skills.

The key is to keep a fairly strict feeding regime, and feed your starter on a daily basis. The yeast bacteria likes to be fed at the same time every day.

This jar contains a portion of our in-house starter. To feed your starter, discard all but a tablespoon, or make sure you save yourself a tablespoon of starter after using it in a bake.  Add 75g of flour and 75g of water to the remaining starter left in the jar, mix well, and put the lid back on your jar.

Leave this till bubbles have formed and your starter passes the float test. Float test; your starter should have enough air in it to float on the top of a glass of water, use a small amount of your starter to test it.

You can use whatever flour you fancy for feeding your starter, but some are better than others. A good example is a mix of 1/3 white, 1/3 whole meal and 1/3 rye flour. Rye and wholemeal are high in the natural starch and sugar that the yeast cultures thrive on, so makes for a good healthy starter.

If you’re not baking for a while, you can pop your starter in the fridge which will slow it down. Once taken out of the fridge, you should feed it a few times to wake it up!

Once your confident with your starters health its time to start making mountains of sourdough bread! Recipe books such as the Tartine Bread (sold in our shop) will take this starting point and build upon this basic technique with a plethora of ideas and insights to make you into a sourdough super star!

Enjoy
Lots of Love
The Marms breaders!
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