People often ask me, "do you have to keep a lot of starter on hand all the time?" The simple answer is NO, you don't. The only reason you'd need a large amount of starter is if you plan on making several loaves of bread at once, or you want to experiment with discard recipes (always fun!). Otherwise, all you really need is around 25g of starter - I have even managed with less than that.
You can keep a small sourdough starter (between 25-50g of starter) on hand and "build" or "scale" your starter when you want to use it.
Understanding Sourdough Starter Ratios To Increase Amount Of Starter
In general, your starter is made up of equal parts flour and water - this is called 100% hydration. You will also see it referred to as 1:1:1 (starter:flour:water). Most sourdough recipes use this method.
How To Increase Your Sourdough Starter
If you want to increase your starter, you will need to work out how much you want to end up with. Let's use 200g as an example. Simply divide this number by 2. This will give you the equal amounts of flour and water that you need to add to your sourdough starter to increase the amount you have.
When you remove the 200g from the jar to do your baking, you'll be left with some residual starter. You can then feed this when you're ready for your next bake. Make sense? Don't worry...I'm terrible at math and I get it!
Example Of How To Increase Your Sourdough Starter:
Let's say you have 50g of starter in your jar, but you would like to have 200g of starter because you want to bake a few different things, you would need to add 100g of each flour and water to that starter to make 200g (because 200g divided by 2 =100g).
This means you will have 250g of starter in your jar when it peaks because you've added 100g of flour and 100g of water to 50g of starter. 100+100+50 = 250!
When you remove your 200g for whatever it is you're baking, you can just put the remaining 50g directly into the fridge since you've already fed it. If you were going to leave it on the counter, you could leave it to fall before you fed it again.
Another example - if you have even less starter to begin with:
Let's say you only have 10g of starter and you wanted 200g, you'd just have to feed it at 1:10:10 which would mean adding 100g of flour and 100g of water to that 10g of sourdough starter.
This would mean that your starter would take quite a while to peak ready for baking as it has a lot of food to get through. But at the end of fermentation - your starter would weigh 210g because 10g of starter plus 100g of flour and 100g of water.
Confused yet?
To put it simply, always feed at least double the amount of starter you currently have by using equal amounts of flour + water - perhaps I should have said that at the beginning. :) Oh, and baker's tip: make sure you leave enough room in your starter to grow!
Further reading:
The Art of Sourdough Bread (click below)
What's included in The Art of Sourdough Bread?
This easy to read book has all the info you need in one place! You'll find:
What makes sourdough bread so good for you?
What is a sourdough starter (sourdough starter guide can be purchased separately).
How to know when your starter is ready to bake with.
A complete start to finish sourdough recipe with everything covered from equipment, ingredients, timing and all the tips to get you baking straight away. Print it out as many times as you like so you can write notes & changes whenever you like!
How to tell when your bulk ferment is finished and your dough is ready to shape.
Basic Sourdough Bread Recipes.
Photos of each step.
Troubleshooting plus frequently asked questions.
Comentarios