Reducing waste while feeding a growing starter

My method of creating sourdough starter from scratch is the lowest waste method I’ve seen. You can follow those instructions, and with the help of your free Floury Friday discard cookbook, never waste a spoonful of starter.

To make great bread, it’s important to bake with a mature starter. To make your sourdough starter more mature, you need to keep feeding it every day in its early stages, to feed the growing population of bacteria and yeasts and develop the more resilient, long-term strains. The best way to go about this is to either make lots of delicious discard recipes, or to reduce the amount of starter in your feeds to the tiniest amount possible (and then make some discard recipes).

Your starter will mature the same whether you’re feeding it 200 grams of flour a day or 20 grams of flour. The key is to match the amount of seed starter (old starter) in your feedings to the amount of flour and water that you’re adding, so that your starter has enough food to grow on, but not so much food that the seed starter gets so diluted that it can’t colonise the new flour and water in time. You can find out more about feeding ratios (and how to adjust it for room temperature) in my starter instructions blog post.

So, if you manage your starter during the feeding-up period with minimal flour and minimal water, you’ll be left with tiny amounts of starter discard to use up. If you don’t end up with enough to make a full discard recipe, you can store up your starter discard in the fridge or freezer until you’re ready to bake with it.

Reducing waste from regular starter maintenance

The kind of maintenance your starter will need will depend on how often you bake.

If you bake every day, you can use the pre-ferment (levain) method and not have to think about maintaining your starter - the pre-ferment method does that for you.

If you bake often and prefer same-day recipes, you can reduce discard by maintaining the tiniest amount of starter, and bulking it up when you need to make a recipe, that way, you are only bulking up the exact amount of starter that you need.

If you only bake every week or two, you’ll probably want to store your starter in the fridge for most of the week. I posted full instructions for storing your starter here.

Keeping your starter as a Desem-style starter or other low hydration starter could also work well with an infrequent baking schedule.

If you store your starter in the fridge, you’ll need to feed it before baking. If it hasn’t been dormant for long, you might be able to get away with just feeding it once, and you’ll end up with minimal discard. Usually it’s safer to give it two feedings, with the first as a ‘wake up’ feed, and the second as the starter (or levain) that you use in your recipe.

As with the starter maintenance, these "wake up"/"feed up" feeds don’t have to use huge amounts of flour and water, you just need to tailor the amount of seed starter to the amount of new flour and new water (1:5:5 seed starter to flour to water by weight usually works well for this).

Making the most of sourdough discard

The free sourdough discard book that all Floury Friday members have access to has so much to offer - there is everything from chocolate cake, to sweet and savoury pies, soda bread, rolls, the easiest ever crackers, and many more options. Maybe you’ll end up like me and make sourdough discard on purpose so you can make these recipes!

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May your starter be lively and full of bubbles. Floury regards,

Kate

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