Starting with your starter

Feeding a starter

There are several ways to keep a starter, relating to it’s thickness:

a “wet” starter which is like a thin cake batter
a thick pancake batter type, as seen in the photo above
a stiff starter that looks like a ball of bread dough

There are advantages to each but for our purposes in this post, we’ll use the more common ‘thick pancake batter’ type. We’ll also be keeping it at what’s referred to in the bread world as “100% hydration”. This simply means your starter has 100% of the flour’s weight in water weight. If you use 163g of flour, you add 163g of water; if you use 47g flour, use 47g water. Your flour’s weight is always the base and your water is the percentage of that weight.

You’ll possibly see other percentages of starters, like 65% hydration starters which are more dough-like since the water weighs 65% of the flour’s weight, therefore less water than flour. This hydration level is in the area that a regular bread dough so you could actually knead it, it is that thick.

You may also see higher hydration levels, like 125% or even more, making the batter thinner. I just wanted to touch on hydration percentages because it seems to pop up a lot in the bread world.

One great thing about 100% hydration starter is no matter how much you use, you’ll always know that it is half water and half flour so it’s easy to adjust any recipe.

Continue reading “Starter Maintenance: Regular feeds”

There are a few ways of getting a pre-made starter

You’re given some liquid starter in a jar by a friend
You’re given or buy a ball of stiff starter dough
You’re given or buy some starter flakes

Whether these are purchased or given by a friend, they’ll be handled as described below. Then, of course, you could make your own from scratch and that’s a whole ‘nuther set of instructions which you can find here.

The first two methods mentioned above mean you’re going to basically just keep feeding your new starter as it had been before; the place or person you got it from should have given you their process which is really just your standard feed. Their particualr methods may use more or less water or flour, so just learn what was used and keep it up.

For the flake version, however, you need to rehydrate/rejuvenate it and get it up to speed again and from that point, you too are on to the maintenance process. But first we need to get those flakes turned into a viable, wet starter.

Continue reading “Getting Startered: Flakey beginnings”