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A New Scale for a New Sourdough Starter

I’ve been enjoying the joys of artisan bread making and neglecting my beloved sourdough. Oh sure I’ve made some sourdough bread. Or scones, or pancakes. Anything to use up that sour, right?

I remember when I first got the artisan bread book, I noticed the whole section on sourdough. I filed that away, like when I have time I will see how they do sourdough. The time finally arrived when the family started grumbling about no fresh Sourdough on Saturdays. Hard to imagine but I heard stuff like “Ciabatta again?!?!” So….. break out the book and roll up the sleeves.

Right away I realized an important point — I really needed to break down and buy a kitchen scale. For this sour recipe, the weights had to be exact.

Of course, I went to Amazon and I found the perfect scale. It has a 5 star rating and over a thousand reviews. Hard to beat that sort of track record. And I do love it. It’s the “EatSmart™ Precision Pro – Multifunction Digital Kitchen Scale w/ Extra Large LCD and 11 Lb. Capacity.” I had to get the red one, of course so that it matches my KitchenAid.

It is a great little scale. It’s light weight and is smaller than a hard cover book. I just keep it on top of the microwave when I don’t need it.

The reason I wanted the scale is that as I was reading in the book, I realized that I’ve been underfeeding my sourdough starter all this time. It was good but I’d never gotten the umph of a bakery sourdough bread with my home recipe. That’s hard to admit, but now that I’ve made bread with the new sour and the new recipe, yeah, this is the best sourdough bread I’ve made.

Here’s the rundown on this sourdough starter recipe:

Take a big clean bowl and put in 4 ounces of flour and 4 ounces of water and mix. Yeah, here’s the thing — water weighs more than flour. I literally had this bell go off in my head. Equal amounts of flour and water cannot be done with a measuring cup! 4 ounces of flour is about a cup and a quarter. 4 ounces of water is about half a cup.

So, you let the mix sit covered on the counter and leave it alone the next day. No feeding, no mixing. The next day, you need the scale. You only need 4 ounces of the starter. We all know how a sourdough starter can take over your kitchen, so toss some of it out. When you have 4 ounces in the bowl, add another 4 ounces of both flour and water. Your water should be about 85 degrees. Pleasantly warm.
The next day, you shift your mix a bit. Take 6 ounces of the sour and add 3 ounces of flour and water. It’s like you are down shifting in a car. It feels weird, but it will pay off.
For the next 3 days you are going to load the sour with food (flour). You just need 3 ounces of sour. Add 9 ounces of flour(!) which is about 2 cups of flour, and 6 ounces of water.
After that point, you can keep a simple ratio for feeding the starter:
2 parts water
1 part starter
3 parts flour
So that could look like this — 4 ounces of water, 2 ounces of sour and 6 ounces of flour.

I wish I’d thought to take pictures. I’ll do that next time I make a sour from the start. At the end, especially the sour is so stiff, you’d think you were making muffins! And then the next day you look and the wild yeast has seriously chowed down on the flour and you have something akin to pancake batter.

Here’s a sour ciabatta loaf I made yesterday:
Just to annoy the family (ha ha) I decided to combine my favorite with their favorite! Turned out great!

More later…..  thanks for reading and I’m curious if any of you use a scale and what you think.

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