Sourdough Starter Demystified

1. Class Intro: [MUSIC] What is a sourdough starter? I read somewhere that it is a container where a symbiotic relationship is formed between microorganisms and bacteria. A community unto itself that coexist together and through manipulation can give you a delicious sourdough bread. It can give rise to your bread, it can give you a fluffy chewy crumb and sourness to it. What do I mean by manipulation? I mean that you can ensure that you have less or no sourness to your bread. Yes, that is possible. You get to choose your own adventure by watching this class and understanding what's happening inside this particular container. Hi. My name is Nadia. For those who follow me and have watched my previous class called Sourdough Bread: Understanding The Hows and Whys, I now bring you Sourdough Starter Demystified. For those who are watching this for the first time and are not following me, I'd suggest you go ahead afterwards watch my previous class, where I go more into detail about what's happening with your sourdough dough before it goes into baking. I am a content creator, photographer, and videographer. Both my partner and I have our own YouTube channel called Nadia and Rob, where we discuss food, food-related products, lifestyle around food, food culture, you name it. That's our channel. If you're curious, I would suggest that you go ahead and check it out because we also pack in quite a bit of taste and knowledge there as well. Not that I would say I'm not recommending it, I am recommending it. I would recommend you go check out our channel. A sourdough starter is a great mystery. It is still being studied by scientists at this time. This class we'll cover what I've discovered and understanding and share my knowledge with all of you guys without being overly sciency or scientific. I want to provide information that I think would benefit you and help you create a much stronger starter that will last you for hopefully years and years. Having your own starter isn't just about crumb, crust, great rise, but it's also about flavor. By manipulating that flavor, you can really take your sourdough bread to the next level. My mother starter is about three years old, just over three years old. She's been fed recently today because it's been two weeks. When I'm not baking, she stays in the fridge during that whole time. Because she is strong and mature, I can get away with not having to feed this starter for up to two weeks. This class is geared towards beginners, but all skill levels can watch this. Any discoveries or thoughts that you would like to share, I would encourage you to put it down in the discussion area. This way we build a community and we get to learn even further about each others' sourdough starters. Everybody's kitchen is different, everybody's environment is different, so your sourdough starter is unique to you. Welcome to my class. I hope that this class will help you understand your sourdough starter. Now let's move on to our lessons. 2. Project Intro: [MUSIC] Before we start our lessons, let's discuss the project of this class. The project is for you to be able to create a strong starter that you can then use in your sourdough bread baking. We will be covering the creation of a brand new starter from scratch from Days 1-14. It's going to be about a two week project. Why Days 1-14. Well, I believe in creating a proper foundation when creating a sourdough starter from scratch, and that's what will be covered in this class. Measurements ratios will be provided so you can follow along and create your own. I will also be providing a guide and some additional notes that you can download and use while creating your own starter as well. Lesson 1 we'll be going over the tools that we need and understanding the requirements of particular ingredients to ensure that your sourdough starter will continue to thrive, once it's been created. Lessons 3 and 4 we'll actually cover what's happening inside of your container and why it's behaving that way. Of course, depending on temperature environment of your kitchen in your home. Then from there on, we get to understand how we can keep the starter going and how to actually store it as well if you aren't baking on a regular basis. I also encourage you to share your thoughts, your discoveries, and anything else that you may have regarding your sourdough starter in the discussion area below, where everyone else can also see what you're doing and share their own discoveries as well. We will also be creating three breads from three types of lavas or starters, that you will be able to see the behavior when you're trying to manipulate a sourdough starter for taste and some characteristic differences of the bread itself when compared. Do feel free to use the lessons as a guide as well. If you need to re-watch it when you're doing something as that's what they are here for. They are here to help you to make sure that you create a amazingly strong sourdough starter that will stay with you for years and years, should you wish. As it matures, they are actually harder to kill, so you don't really need to worry. There is no fear when it comes to your sourdough starter. Your sourdough starter is your pal in the kitchen, it is your pal in baking. You can use this class to understand how to build a beautiful relationship with your sourdough starter. I'm looking forward to seeing what all of you create when it comes to sourdough starters. If you name your sourdough starters, please let us know as well. At one point, my very first starter I had named it Tamagotchi. Now I just call it my mother's starter, but there's no harm in naming your starter because it is your little buddy. I'm curious to know what you name them. Let's start the lessons and let's go on a discovery journey together. See you in Lesson 1 [MUSIC]. 3. What You Need and What To Expect: Hi everyone, welcome to the first lesson of sourdough starter demystified. In this lesson, we'll be covering five key things, which are flour, water, measurements/ratios, tools needed, and what to expect with your sour dough starter or while creating it. Now the first thing, or actually two things that are very important for flour and water. Now, for flour, for best results, I'd recommend using whole grain flour. It could be either whole wheat, whole rye, or whole spelled. Reason being because a whole grain flour actually has all the nutrients and the microbes needed initially to help build your sour dough starter, give it all that it needs to start gaining strength during gestation period if you want to call it that way and start becoming a young, healthy sour dough starter. If you are milling your own grains at home, it's even better because you have the endosperm, the brand, the germ, everything that is within that grain will be included, which means it will have even more nutrients and microbes. All the strength that's needed. I don't mill my own flour at home. I do have access to a bookstore so I can actually get wholegrain flour from there and feed my starter with. A miller is not a necessity or a milling machine is not a necessity, but it's a nice to have, so to speak. Now, if you only have all-purpose flour or bread flour that are extremely sifted, meaning that there's no brand or grain within the flour, please make sure that it is unbleached. Reason being because the bleaching process actually does kill off the nutrients the microbes needed for the sourdough starter to begin with. So if it doesn't have all the nutrition in the beginning, it won't thrive. It will actually hinder the growth process. Out of all-purpose and bread flour, I would go with bread flour because it actually had some more in there than just an all-purpose. The all-purpose flour has just been sifted even further so if there was any little bits of anything left behind, it'd be taken out. Now for water, the question tends to be, can I use my tap water? The answer is, it depends. It depends on, can you drink your tap water within your city or region? If you can, then that's great. That means it's usable. But I would recommend that you place the water in a jogger or a jar and leave it on your counter uncovered for at least an hour. Reason being because if there's any chlorine present in the water, it actually allows the chlorine to evaporate. So give it at least an hour, if not more, to allow the chlorine to evaporate completely. Chlorine will also inhibit the growth of a sourdough starter. So it's not going to really thrive if there's chlorine present. I know some people you have used tap water without letting the chlorine evaporate and they've been able to create a sour dough starter. But I believe in trying to give as much ammo to a sourdough starter as you can in the beginning to enable it to thrive and continue to thrive. At home, I use distilled water. We do have a countertop distiller because we use it for a coffee machine so that we can avoid any calcification or any other buildup in our coffee machine or scaling. But if you don't have distilled water at home, it's not a necessity. Again, it's just another nice to have. Tap water is fine as long as it's drinkable. If you can't drink your own tap water, then you wouldn't want to use if your sourdough starter or even for your bread baking. Measurements and ratios. Now, when I was very green to the sourdough game, I was learning at that time from someone else on how to build my very own sourdough starter, and I was told to first use a large amount of flour and water mixture. The amount was 100 grams of flour and 100 grams of water to make a total of 200 grams of flour water dough mixture. When it came to feeding it, discard half of the mixture and add another 100 grams of flour and 100 grams of water. It just kept building. Now, it's fine, it works. But I learned over time as I was making my own sourdough starters at home and experimenting that I did not need such a large amount to get it going because all it's going to do is we're still going to have yeast coming in there. If you don't stick with the proper feeding schedule or the amount that you're giving, exponentially you can eventually starve your starter. So I decided to keep my math simple by keeping a smaller amount of starter around. This is my starter. If you can really see. As you can see, it's a tiny amount in there. This is what I keep in the fridge and I feed it every two weeks. But I've had this starter for over three years, so I know it's strong enough to handle without being fed for two weeks. You have to remember a sour dough starter is just an inoculation. I use a bit of it to go into what I make a levain. A levain is what I use when I use it completely for bread baking. I try to keep it separate because if something goes wrong with the levain, then at least my mother's starter is still healthy and strong and going. I've spent so much time and love in building the starter, I wouldn't want see its demise. I'll be very unhappy and sad. So in this class, we're going to go on how to just build a small amount of your starter. I use the discard method, I've used it many times and I find that my starter was a lot healthier as a result. So that is what I'll be showing you in this class. Tools that will be needed for this class are: jar with a loose lid and a rubber band to use as a marker, water, flour. Whole grain is recommended, but if you only have bread flour, please go ahead and use that. Digital scale, spatula, and a spoon. The spatula that I would also recommend is one that is straight-sided on both sides, but these scraper part has a bit of a curve. Reason I like that is because then I find you can really scrape the sides of the jar down really clean. Nicely in that way, you can see the rise and fall of your starter. I like to keep my jar as clean as I possibly can, so I can have a good visible or visual cue of what's happening. It's just a nice habit to have. What to expect. Now, a starter's growth depends on the environment and the food that it's getting. I've made a sour dough starter from scratch in the summer, and it only took about a week for it to become ready to use. I've also made a sour dough starter in winter when it's a lot colder and it took about two weeks before it was ready to use. In both cases, I was using the same flour and water mixture and that told me that obviously it was the temperature that was the variant or the variable that was causing either the speed or the delay of the sour dough starter. Essentially, it was a temperature that controlled the growth. In winter time, the bacteria and yeast are a little sluggish. They're not moving around as much, so it will take a lot longer for them to do what they'd want it to and that's including eating and creating gas and hanging out with each other, so to speak. For the purpose of this class, we'll be creating a sour dough starter with a one-to-one ratio, meaning that it will be equal parts of flour and water. Once we've created a good, strong, young starter, we will then be making three. I apologize in advance that'll be probably using starter and levain at times in the same sentence. But when it comes to baking bread, we will be making three different starters for now, which will be regular starter, which would be a one-to-one ratio, a stiff starter, which would be a two-to-one ratio, and a regular starter with a bit of sugar in it. We'll also be seeing a comparison between my mature starter and the young star that we've created, to see how quickly it feeds and holds its place at its peak before collapsing. In the next lesson, we'll be going over in making the mixture for our starter day 1. So see you in the next class. 4. Let's Start Creating Our Starter: [MUSIC] Welcome back everyone to our Lesson 2. In this lesson, we are essentially going to start working on creating our sourdough starter. This is Day 1. The mixture that we're going to be working with or the ratio is 1 to 1. The measurement is going to be 40 grams of flour and 40 grams of water. For flour, again, I would recommend whole grain if you don't have a whole grain, you can use bread flour. The benefits though of a whole grain flour is that because of all the nutrients the microbes in there, it is an all-day buffet to a sourdough starter when it's first starting off which means you only need to feed it once a day for about seven days. The feeding schedule is 24 hours. If you're going to be using bread flour, I would recommend feeding schedule twice a day. I believe some people only do once a day for about the first two or three days and then after that, start feeding it twice a day, you will need to see the behavior of your starter if it starts to show any activity of how hungry it seems. You can tell when it's hungry it's when it rises and when it starts to fall, the drag marks indicate that it's starting to fall after it's reached its peak, which is when you really need to feed it because it's hitten starvation point. But for this, if you have wholegrain flour, 24-hour feeding schedule, if you have only bread flour, I would say every 12 hours feeding schedule for the first seven days. Now again, as discussed in the previous lesson, temperature does come into play. At the time of the recording of the sourdough starter that I'm making for the purpose of this class, it was spring, a very chilly spring so the activity was a little on the low side. When I once made a sourdough starter in the heat of the summer, it was very hot and very humid. The first day I saw a major activity where the sourdough starter was actually ready to come out of the jar. That's how much activity I had. It was pretty intense. But for this one, it was pretty quiet, not much activity as you can see in the video recording. I don't even think it barely moved. I think it just stayed where it was. It said no, thank you to me at the time from the looks of it. I realized early on, they actually don't need that much of flour and water, in the beginning, to get a starter going. You just need a feeding ground and an environment for the starter to thrive in. Also, because I use the discard method, there are other methods, but I prefer the discard because I found that my starters have gotten healthier and stronger a lot faster. By using a smaller amount, I'm actually helping to create less waste in a way. Our city where we live, we do have a compost program so I know that all my discards are being contributed to the compost program. If your city or region has a compost program, I'd say you can use it guilt-free. If you do your own composting then that's fine. Other people like to bake waffles, pancakes, crackers, you name it with their discards. You can do that as well. I don't make any of those things, so I can just discard and because I have just a small amount of starter that I'm feeding, I know if I take even a quarter of this, I'm only creating this much waste. I'm not creating as much of a waste when you think about it. I'm only discarding about this much of it. If you want to give your discard to a friend or a family so they can make their own sourdough starter, they can use that as an inoculation as well. Again, think about it, a starter is just an inoculation, so you're only taking a portion of the starter to inoculate another flower water mixture to make your levain in preparation for baking. Why keep such a large amount around because if you don't do the math and feed it in its exponential amount, then you're going to start starving your starter and eventually it'll stop thriving and probably die. Unless you're making multiple breads a day when you need a large amount of sourdough, you really only need this much. Also, it becomes a waste after a while when you have so much around knowing you'll have to get rid of it because you cannot support in feeding it. If you're not baking as much but you want to keep a starter around, this amount is fine to do discards and feeds with because if you keep it in your fridge like I do, my starter is very healthy. I only have to feed it once every two weeks and it's fine. The other benefit of using it as an inoculation is that should something go wrong with your levain for baking, at least your mother starter is still strong and healthy and uncontaminated, so you can rely on the amount that you have already. This is I think closer if not more than three years old. I think more than three years old, it is extremely strong. It is my best friend when it comes to baking my little pow and I always make sure that it's happy and healthy. Let's mix the flour and the water together and mix it all up. Clean off the sides with the spatula, put a rubber band roughly around where it's been leveled off to and we'll let it sit for a day and see how it does. In the next lesson, we are now going to go into Day 2 and review Day 1. See you in the next lesson. 5. How Well is Day 2 Going?: Welcome back everyone. We are now in Lesson 3, but Day 2 of our starter. Don't get the two confused. I'm probably going to get confused. Anyways. Day 1, let's review it really quickly. We saw no activity. Probably because the temperature was so cold. We saw no activity, but it doesn't mean that nothing has been happening in there. I like to always sniff my starter. Sounds weird, but I like to give it a sniff. I knew Day 1 it was just going to smell like dough. I've done this so many times before the Day 1 always smells like dough. Sometimes you'll see some changes in scent in Day 2 and onwards. But it also depends on your temperature. If the temperature is cold, all the microbes are actually not moving around as much. They're just being quite lazy and probably sluggish, so you won't see much activity. As for Day 2, up from Day 2 to Day 7, we're going to stick to the same schedule. If you're using whole grain, which is a feeding of every 24 hours. If we're doing bread flour, then probably a feeding of every 12 hours. We're going to stick to the same ratio, 40 grams of flour and 40 grams of water. In terms of the mixture from Day 1, which is not quite a starter yet, discard half of it out. Then mix in the 40 grams of flour and 40 grams of water. Give it a good mix. Scrape down the sides, readjust your rubber band if you need to, and let it go, let it do its thing. Now in some cases on Day 2, if you didn't see any activity on Day 1, you may see activity in Day 2, where a colony of microorganisms are probably arriving, ones that are existing in the grain to that, maybe in the air. Three that may promote from the water. Four that even your hands, whatever microorganisms, even bacteria that are on your hands, anything in the environment can now start to enter into the jar because the lid is very loose and you may start to see some activity. Also because you have the dough mixture from Day 1, it also has a lot of it's own colony of microorganisms that have entered within the 24 hour period. If you do see any activity, it's probably the microorganisms ******* and burping, releasing their own CO_2 gas within the dough mixture. That's what it's promoting the growth or the height of the sourdough starter or the dough mixture, whichever you want to call it right now. I think it's a little too soon to call it a sourdough starter. There are just so much joy filled within that jar on Day 2 of finding their new home that they're just excessively releasing gas everywhere. After we've mixed and if you look at the recording, there has been a lot of activity during Day 2. The microorganisms are so happy to have found this new home that they're just releasing gas everywhere. Sounds silly, but that's really what's happening. They're just filled with joy of founding this new home. I'm wondering and I'm hoping that this continues on to Day 3, 4, and 5. In the next lesson, we're going to review footage over Days 3, 4, and 5 and what's going on with the sourdough starter. See you in the next lesson. 6. Is My Starter Dead? What's Really Going On: We're back, Lesson 4. In Lesson 4, we are going to be reviewing footage from Days 3, 4, and 5 of our sourdough starter. As a recap, we are sticking with a 24 hour feeding schedule because I'm using whole grain flour. If you're using bread flour, stick to 12 hour feeding schedule. It's the same amount or same ratio, 40 grams of flour and 40 grams of water, and we are discarding half of the previous day's mixture to mix in with. Now, Days 3, 4, and 5 get a little interesting because this is where it really gets people. It got me the first few times. After that, once I understood what was happening, I relaxed because I knew at some point activity maker. If you see footage from Days 3, 4, and 5, there's barely any activity. I think in one of the days there is no activity. What's really happening? Some people ask, is my sourdough starter dead? Not by any means. It's not dead at all, and it's not quite dormant either. What's happening is a battle. A battle is ensuing in this new found territory, and this territory has been discovered by other microorganisms in the environment, so they would like to inhabit it. But you can't have so many microorganisms in one battle ground or territory. You may, I mean, science is still discovering a number of things that's happening within a sourdough starter. We're still in the early stages of understanding why it does, what it does and how it comes to be. In Day 1 and 2, a microorganism specie or a few of those species entered, and on Day 2, we saw a lot of activity happening because there were just so happy, they basically threw a party and release gas everywhere. Day 3, another specie of microorganism arrived and went, I think I want to stick around. What do you think? [NOISE] The micro organisms that are already there went, No, I don't think so. A battle starts to see who becomes dominant. [NOISE] That's what's happening between Days 3, 4, and 5 in my case of my starter here. That's why there's barely an activity because they're trying to duke it out to see who's going to stick around. We all know what happens in a battle. There are casualties. Because there are casualties, there isn't enough of yeast of any kind to help release any gas or growth. Doesn't mean you stop feeding it because if you want one of the yeast to survive, you need to feed it, give it more ammo so it becomes stronger of whichever specie ends up surviving. That specie will depend on your environment, your kitchen, your hands, everything. That's the type of specie will probably stick around, not every specie is alike, not every kitchen is alike. If you're wondering whether your sourdough starter [NOISE] isn't thriving, is just it's going through something that's really hectic, and they are going through their own soap opera that they need to work out. Now, when do you know when a particular specie of yeast has survived? When you start seeing activity again. Till then, just keep feeding it and give it the strength it needs to do whatever it needs to do and duke it out and win it. There may still be other small colonies around of different species. I believe some scientists have discovered that it's not just one type of yeast that ends up living in a sourdough starter. There are other types as well. We have one dominant that basically rules them all, becomes its lord and is the primary yeast within that sourdough starter. Instant yeast, I believe is only one kind of yeast, but there are other yeasts in the environment that end up living in the sourdough starter. No two starters are alike either, interestingly enough, which I thought was very interesting. Also the type of flour you use will also enable a particular type of yeast specie to be there. In which case, if within the seven-day period you decide to change your flour, one, maybe because you can't have access or don't have access to it anymore or you decide, I'm not seeing any growth, I want to try changing the flour, you're hitting the reset button when you do that. If you change the flour, you're introducing another type of specie and it will go into another battle and you probably won't see much reaction. You may see reaction the first day when you add that new flour in. But the second day I guarantee it's just going to be a flatline. Trust me, I've been through this many times. I would highly recommend you have enough of the same flour for at least the first seven days and keep some of that same flour around for the feeding going forward as it will encourage that same type of yeast to stick around and stay very strong and healthy. In the next lesson, we're going to go over Day 6 and 7. We are almost there. We're almost done making our starter. Almost. Remember that word. Almost. But after seeing that nothing much has happen in Days 3, 4, and 5, hopefully, there's activity in Days 6 and 7. See you in the next lesson. 7. Battle Has Ended and We Have...?: [MUSIC] Welcome back. We are at Lesson Five. In Lesson Five, we're going to go over Days 6 and 7. What do we see in Days 6 and 7 when we review the footage? That's right. We see activity on Day 6. Why? Because that means that the battleground or the battle has ended and a particular microorganism or yeast has laid claim to the land and declared it as its new home. So happy for it because now this yeast has become my new power in the baking game. What this also means though, this yeast is weak at this point, what happens in a battle is that there are casualties, so it has lost a lot of its buddies in the fight. Which means it's at a bit of a weak stage right now, which means it needs to be fed because this young yeast is so weak. Therefore, by sticking to the same flour, you are now feeding it whatever you had given it beforehand to win that battle and it'll start growing and thriving. Your waiting and your patience has been greatly rewarded. You now will be having a reliable sourdough starter. Please don't change the flour. But not only is there a dominant microorganism, yeast that has taken over the territory, it also has partner or partners depending of bacterias, namely lactic and/or acetic acid. Those are bacterias. They are not your foe. They can be your friend. You don't want to fight them because lactic acid is what gives the sour taste in your sourdough bread. It also breaks down hard-to-digest gluten, which is why a lot of people who are gluten sensitive or have issues with their tummy and can't eat bread, are able to have a sourdough bread because the lactic acid has done most of the work for you. So it's not your foe. It's not your enemy. It can be your friend. How can it be your friend? Well, without it realizing it, you can actually manipulate this friend. Why do I use the word manipulate is because what I mean is because it lends a flavor to your sourdough bread, you can manipulate in terms of how much sour flavor you want in your bread. Some people like their breads really sour. Like the San Francisco bread, I believe. I've been told many times it's extremely sour and it's known for it and people love that. I am on the other side where I'm not a big fan of sourness, I just want enough where it actually activates my saliva glands and gives me a little je ne sais quoi taste of the bread. But I don't want it to overpower where then I can't enjoy other toppings that I may put on the bread. When I was selling bread, I would have customers who would want it really sour, and I would have customers who only wanted a little bit sour. Then I had customers who didn't want it sour at all. So I had to learn that from my mother starter, how to create levians, as long as I was given notice ahead of time, I could build those levians for this particular flavors and make the bread. That is what you can do. You can manipulate the flavor from the sourdough starter of what your bread is going to taste like. I think that's pretty amazing. More of that will be discussed in a few lessons later on. But I wanted to put that seed in your mind now, you can manipulate the flavor of your sourdough bread by playing around with the lactic acid within the sourdough starter. At this point, you may notice a black liquid showing up on the top layer of your starter. That's called a hooch, It's like a blackish gray liquid. It's not a bad thing at all. You can either pour it off or you can mix it into your starter. It doesn't harm the starter in any way. I actually tried for the purpose of this class to actually create hooch, I was really trying and it just wouldn't do it for me. It just refused. So I unfortunately don't have an example of what a hooch looks like. But if you see a blackish grayish liquid literally slopping around on top of the top layer, just either pour it out or mix it in; it doesn't harm the starter in any way. Also, you want to get into the habit of sniffing your starter. I, on daily basis, give it a sniff and see what it's smelling like. If it's smelling like a fermentation where the best description would be like when you go into whiskey distillery has a sickly sweet smell. That's what a fermentation from a sourdough starter will probably smell like. Some people claim they can smell cinnamon. I don't smell it in mine but I smell fermentation. If you're starting to get a cheesy smell or like an acetone, acetone being like nail polish remover smell, throw it out; that starter, there's no hope of return. Something has gone extremely wrong. It will probably die off anyways, but you don't want to use it for bread baking, trust me. The cheesy taste will actually make your bread taste like cheese, but it may also be not that great for you. The acetone one, definitely don't use it. We don't know what's going on. Just chuck it out and start from the beginning again. I know it sucks, but just start from the beginning again. I don't want to recommend using any cheesy or acetone smell sourdough starters in your bread baking no matter how high of a heat you're baking in; something's just not right with that starter. Now by Day 7, people see a lot of activity. They're like, my sourdough starter is ready, it has now become yeast that I can use for my bread and people actually do bake with it and are quite happy with the results. I like to take it a step further to ensure my starter is in fact extremely, extremely strong. I actually go for another week of feeding. The reason I also do that because I actually see a behavior change in my starter. It now wants to go into a 12-hour day cycle of feeding as opposed to 24-hour day even though it's a whole grain. Which means I now go into twice a day feeding schedule starting from Day 8. We also make another addition to the sourdough starter. So the next lesson we're going to go over Days 8-14 and see what changes we've made and what habits or behaviors we're seeing. So see you in the next lesson. 8. Week 2 of Our Starter and Some Changes: [MUSIC] We're here with Lesson 6. In Lesson 6, we'll be going over and reviewing days 8-14 of our young and very active at this point sourdough starter. First thing I've noticed it's actually getting hungrier a lot faster, it's going through the food a lot faster. So I have now switched from 24-hour to a 12-hour feeding schedule, which means twice a day. I've actually added something a little different to the sourdough starter. I've actually added a bit of bread flour. Why after the seventh day since we've been just feeding with whole grain flour this whole time, have I decided to add a bit of bread flour? Well, before I answer that, I would like to ask people, have you heard of the float test? What is a float test for those who haven't heard? Well, a float test is to check to see for your starter is ready and active to use for baking. It is a very popular method to use. What you literally do is take a teaspoon, take a little small scoop of your starter once it's hit its peak, take a bowl of chilled or cold water, and gently put in that scoop of sourdough starter and see if it floats. The float test, aptly-named. Don't do what I did by just plopping it into the water, it's definitely going to sink no matter what; you've just busted the air out of that thing. Gently just use another finger or use your finger and just put it on there. [MUSIC] I don't use the float test. I go by seeing what the starter is looking like. If it's active and bubbling and it smells like fermentation and it's nice and tall, it is definitely perfectly good to use for bread baking at that point because it is filled with gas, which means when it's feeding again inside of your dough, your dough will be filled with gas and ready to bake. Another reason I don't use a float test, I discovered early on that if you're just using a whole grain based sourdough starter and you try to perform the float test, nine times out of 10 it will fail. It does not mean you starter is not ready, it just means it's too dense to actually float. Think about it. When you're making a whole wheat bread versus a bread flour base bread, the whole wheat bread will always be dense. The bubbles are very tight or the crumbs are, it's going to be very tight and very small but it's still a delicious bread. Whereas the one where it's just bread flour, one, it has more gluten in it so it can really stretch out. Two, because of the gluten network structure, the gas can be trapped a lot better which will enable the flour to rise. Because it doesn't have so much grain in it from the whole wheat, there isn't enough weight weighing it down. Same goes for your sourdough starter. A whole grain base sourdough starter is just way too dense to actually successfully perform a float test. A bread flour base starter will always 10 out of 10, maybe even 11 out of 10 pass the float test. I learned to note the smell and the behavior of the sourdough starter and see what it's looking like and has never failed me. Use your senses and they can clearly let you know how your starter is doing, and how it's going to do during bread baking as well. So the reason I add a bit of bread flour to my starter is because of the gluten network properties within the bread flour. I have found that after a while, you just use a whole grain-based flour, especially if you're doing a one-to-one ratio, the starter is quite soupy and texture it's quite loose, I don't like that. By adding a bit of bread flour because the gluten structure in there, it becomes a little stickier which means the starters stays better together, which means I can actually scoop it out in one chunk and not have it pour out if that makes any sense. It's more of a textural preference for me, where you can use the whole grain flour if you want. But I have also found, and I would love to know if other people make the same discovery, that because I added a bit of the bread flour in the sourdough starter my bread when it's rising and baking, it actually rises a little bit better versus just using a whole grain base sourdough starter. It could be just me, I don't know if anybody else does that. I haven't met anybody else who actually mixes bread flour and whole grain flour. If you do, please let us know in the discussion area what you've discovered. Sourdough starter is quite young, especially in North America in terms of making, thriving, feeding, keeping it. The more we discuss with each other and share our discoveries, the more we'll know. Then what is my ratio for the bread flour to whole grain mixture? My ratio is three to one, three being the whole grain flour and one being the bread flour. I actually keep it pre-mixed in a jar dedicated to the sourdough starter. I don't really need a lot of the bread flour within the mixture to keep the sourdough starter going. The whole grain mixture is the same flour I've been using since the beginning when I first started building the sourdough starter. So that way it keeps thriving. All this time, I've been doing a feeding schedule of twice a day with my three-to-one ratio of whole grain bread flour mixture. If you've only been using bread flour, I would recommend feeding it at least three times a day, it'll let you know. If you see it rise and then fall and you see drag marks, it's clearly extremely hungry, basically starving, you need to feed it. If it can go with just being fed twice a day, then that's fine as well. But, you don't want to keep starving your starter either. Because the more you starve it or the frequency of it, you're not enabling it for it to become stronger and healthier. You want to keep feeding it. Once it hits peak, feed it. If it drops a little, drags down a little, that's fine. But if you really see it drag down, you don't want to keep doing that because then it won't thrive as well. You've worked so hard to build a starter and nurture it, and build a relationship with it and make it your pal in the baking game, you want to keep it going. Once it becomes healthier, stronger, then you can store your starter in a way where if you don't bake as often, you still have a healthy starter to work with. Get to know its feeding cycle, build a relationship with it and you'll be happier for it and so will the starter. When you see a comparison of my mature starter, which is three years old, compared to the young starter we've made, you can see that, yes, the mature starter does rise faster than the young starter, but it's also holding its peak a lot longer than the young starter, whereas the young starter hits its peak and then starts to fall. It is so hungry, it is starving that it wants to be fed. Whereas the mature starter, because it has so much yeast in there and they're all strong and bulked out and healthy, they don't have the need to feed that quickly. That's what I mean. If your starter is very strong and healthy as it matures, you don't have to feed it actually that often to keep it going. That's why my starter can sit in the fridge for up to two weeks without being fed. Few times I've gone a month without feeding it because I want to see what would happen and will still find it came back. But, it's not something I would do often because all I'm doing is actually hindering its growth progress. That's why you want to keep your healthy stronger going because then you don't have to feed it as often, which also means you can schedule out your baking time in a way where you know you don't have to run and use your levain or starter right away for bread baking. You can actually have the starter growing overnight or the levain growing overnight, and then start your dough mixing in the morning which is what I do. [MUSIC] My starter can go on a 10-hour feeding schedule. When I wake up in the morning, start my autolyse and then add the starter once my autolyse done, and then go about my day. In the next lesson, we'll discuss what to do with the starter once it's become healthy and strong. See you in the next lesson. 9. Methods of Storing Your Starter: [MUSIC] Lesson 7. Everyone, we are getting there. We're almost getting there. But before we get to baking bread with our starter, our newly found starter created or discovered or whichever you want to call it, your new starter baby. We want to or at least I, I want to go over what you can do with your young and healthy starter for those who just don't really bake that often. If you bake every day or multiple times a week, then you can just keep feeding your starter on your countertop if you want. I have stopped selling bread because I have other priorities. My starter now lives in the fridge a lot more often. What I do is because my starter is three years old, I know it's super strong. It can go up to twice a month for feeding, so fed once every two weeks. At this point your starter is just still on the young side, semi-strong side, still needs a lot of ammo to get it strong and healthier. With age and maturity, I would say feed it once a week once you put it in your fridge. Keep a small amount, you don't need a large amount. This one is even smaller amount because again, I use it as an inoculation. This only has I would say about 10 grams of starter and 25 grams of flour. I make it a little bit stiff, so I only use about 15 grams of water. I keep it stiff because I find it lasts even longer in the fridge but that's becoming more of an advance. Right now we're just discussing what do with your current starter. I can do that with this because it's a super-strong starters. After a year if you want you can make more of a stiffer starter to keep in your fridge to make it last longer in the fridge. Meantime, I would say keep the same starter of your building in the fridge till it becomes nice and healthy. You can also store it in the freezer. It's not a method that I've used. I know other people who have used it and I've been told to allow it gently to frost on its own whether in the fridge which will take a lot longer or on the countertop. Please don't put it in the microwave on defrost because you are just basically cooking it by biased order. Just let it gently defrost. It will require a lot of patients. The other method, and this is a method that I have not used yet but I'm looking forward to at some point in the far future is you take a baking sheet, put parchment paper on top and spread your sourdough starter thinly on top of the paper. Let it dry on your counter. Don't use a dehydrater. Just let it dry on your counter. It may take a day if not more depending on your environment in the kitchen. Then just break it up. Some people put in ziploc bags and store it in the freezer. Some people put those in a jar and store it on their shelf in a dark cool place so it doesn't get disturbed. You don't want any sunlight hitting it. Some people actually give it to friends and families, those chips to make their own starters with. It's great because what it's doing, it now allow the starter to hit a stable point. It's neither feeding, neither growing, neither declining. It is hit a full stable phase. Is that the word I'm looking for? Phase. It's extremely stable. When you're ready to use it, you take one of those chips or two, put it in a jar, put it in a bit of water and flour mixture, stir it all up. After s few feedings if you haven't seen any activity right away then after a few feedings you should start seeing activity in your starters box so you can do that as well. But I think it's great. Break it up, put it in ziploc bags, put in the freezer, and it'll be fine as long as you make sure that there isn't any frost forming on it and you'll be fine, so airtight. I do apologize, I don't have an example of the drawing method. Maybe in the future if I put something together I can share in the discussion. If you use a drying method please do share in the discussion area with others. I think it's a great method. I haven't had the need to do it which is why I haven't done it. But if you do please do share, we'd love to see it. What we've been waiting for in the next lesson, we will be creating three levain. A levain is where you will be using all of that starter for your dough. You won't be leaving anything behind. We will be making three of them. We are making a stiff starter which is a two-to-one ratio. We are making a regular starter, one-to-one ratio, and we are making a regular starter with some sugar added to it. In the next lesson we'll discuss why we're doing it that way and the results of the bread and how you can benefit from it. See you in the next lesson. 10. Creating Three Different Starters: [MUSIC] Lesson 8, we are at Lesson 8, which is great because my mouth is getting a little dry. Thank you for everyone for sticking to all the lessons and you've made it this far. We still have a few more lessons to go, but this is the exciting bit, for me, anyways. This is where you can understand how you can manipulate your sourdough starter to impart a particular flavor in your bread. I feel like when it comes to sourdough bread baking, I've seen so much around to get the perfect crust, the perfect score, the perfect crumb. Do you want a big crumb? Do you want a small crumb? Do you want to wild crumb? Are wild crumbs bad? Do you want to get rid of them or do you want to keep them around? How much butter and jam do you want going through each crumb? There's so many questions in the world. But the one question I find that never gets asked is flavor. Your sourdough starter will be imparting flavor into your bread and that's where I think is a missed opportunity. The lactic acid bacteria in your sourdough starter is where you can manipulate to impart a particular flavor in your bread. Like I said before, I used to sell a lot of bread. I had customers who wanted really sour, some didn't want any sour, some who wanted just a little bit of sour. I built out levains as long as I was given enough of a notice to manipulate the flavor so that they could taste it in the bread, and they could taste it in the bread. One easy way of getting the particular flavors you want is building out a starter that's a regular starter one-to-one where it's equal parts of flour and water. Other is the stiff starter, which is a two-to-one ratio where there's more flour than water. The third one that we're going to do, for the purpose of this class experiment, is a regular starter and adding 25 percent of sugar to it. [MUSIC] The regulars starter will always have a sour to it. How sour? It all depends on there are a lot of variables in there and as you get into the sourdough starter making, you can experiment to see what gives it more of a sour taste and what takes away the sour taste. In some cases, if you want to even give more of a sour taste, I've been told to add rye flour to the sourdough starter, because the rye flour already has a lot of lactic acid on the grain so it will impart a more sour flavor right from the beginning. If you don't want a sour taste in your bread baking, say if you're making brioche and you don't want that sourness in there, you make a stiff starter. Because most of the lactic acid lives in the water. So by adding more flour than water, you're actually giving the yeast more of an opportunity to propagate within that starter because it has more feeding essentially to work with and not allowing the lactic acid to build up. There's a lot going in that jar. We're not aware of how much is happening inside of there. By adding sugar, and some people even add baking soda instead of sugar, you are also taking away the sourness naturally because you're adding something sweet to it. The one thing you should keep in mind, which I had failed to do when doing this experiment, is that by also adding sugar, you are also influencing the hydration level of the sourdough starter. Because as a sugar crystals melt, they will release some water into the starter as well. Keep that in mind. So regular starter will give you sourness, stiff starter will take away most of the sourness, and regular starter with sugar will also take away some of the sourness. Which is more sour, which is less sour? That's what we're going to see with this experiments, and also if it influences any other characteristics of the bread. I'll be providing over here the measurements for the regular, stiff, and the regular with sugar levain or starter. We'll be using those for the bread baking. The bread baking, I have now kept all variables the same, I've kept the amount of flour, amount of water, which is a 75 percent hydration before adding the starter, salt, and I'm also going to be maintaining same timing. Proofing, fermenting time will be same for all three those, including what time they'll go into the fridge for overnight proofing as well, I'm keeping everything the same. The only difference are the three levains or starters. Again, I apologize. I will be going and saying starter levain in both cases in one sentence. But a levain is where you are building a starter for the purpose of baking using all of it versus a starter, which is what you keep around. See where it gets confusing? Yeah, I know. We're making three levains. Those are the only influences for the bread baking purposes. Everything else is equal. In the next lesson, let's bake some bread and check the results. See you in the next lesson. 11. Time To Bake and Taste!: [MUSIC] Lesson 9. Finally, yes, I said finally for the previous lesson, but this lesson as well, because we are finally baking breads with the three lavas. We're going to finally check the results. Again, all the variables were kept the same. The amount of flour, which I believe was only 250 grams of flour I wanted to make small breads. Hydration kept the 75 percent prior to add the lavas. Salt is the same and all the fermentation proofing time, everything will be kept the same. Again, I had failed to realize that in the regular sugar lava, once the sugar melted, it actually influenced the hydration of the starter even further, which meant that it influenced the hydration of the dough once I added the starter in, the dough was a lot more liquidy. It required a lot more manipulation to the dough to make it stronger and be able to meet into bread, which also means that the proofing time would have been different if I was managing the proofing time for each bread individually. But for the experiment, I wanted to keep everything the same. We can see here, all three breads are done. The crust right now looks great, the scores and then look great. The one with the sugar, you can see it has the characteristics of it being close to over-proofing. The score is not that great. The rise is pretty good. But if I let it stay out on the counter any longer or in the fridge for any longer, then it would have definitely been over-proofed, and we would have had more of like a pancake type bread, really flatbread, but we got it, we have it for the purpose of this experiment. Stiff starter gave us a much taller bread. It's beautiful. The score is also beautiful. The regular starter also gave us a nice tall bread, but when you put it side-by-side with the stiff starter bread, you can see the one with the stiff starter is still much taller. But both of them, the cross looks beautiful and the scores came out really beautiful. If I tap at the bottom, it gives a nice crusty knock sound. Nice and hollow on the inside. The regular starter, the sugar, not as tall as the other two. The score is nice, decent, but not as magnificent looking as the other two. That's because it almost over-proofed. If I had put this bread away sooner in the fridge and baked it sooner, I guarantee this would have been a much taller bread with a nicer score on it, but that's okay. At the end of the day, the bread would still taste great no matter what. Once we cut into all three breads, we can see the crumb, the crumb for this tiff starter. There's a bit of a wild or big wild crumb in there. It happens. It's still a young starter. I feel like as opposed to the bread with the starter, with the sugar, I feel like the stiff starter bread would've benefited with a longer fermentation time. Because it had less water in the stiff starter, it didn't influence the hydration level in the dough as much, which means it could have actually fermented for a lot longer. Otherwise, the bread still looks great. Could also have been the way that I had shaped it wasn't that great. There's a lot of variables, but inevitably, you will probably get a wild crumb down then no matter what you do. The regular starter bread, the crumb looks great. Again, we have a bit of a wild crumb in there, but the overall crumbs structure it looks fantastic. Same with the bread, with the regular plus sugars starter. What I did note though, that the crust for the bread with the sugar in it is a lot thinner. The crust on the bread with the sugar in it is slightly softer and thinner while the crust with a stiff starter is crunchy and hold its shape better. Whereas the crust for both, the stiff starter and the regular starter bread is great, it's crunchy, it has a give to it, it's got a great bite to it. If you're a person who doesn't really want a crusty bread or wants something that's very gum friendly as I like to call it, adding a bit of sugar in your starter may be a good thing for you. Whereas the other two, the crust are very crunchy. But the most important thing is the flavor, the flavor between the three breads. In the regular starter bread, I can definitely taste soreness in the bread. In the bread with a stiff starter, you can't really taste the sourness, is just a little bit that just activates the saliva glands and the back of your jaw here. The one with the sugar, same thing with the stiff starter one is just enough. There's just a hint of sourness that you can't really detect, but it's enough to activate the saliva glands. You know what I mean because if you have a bread with no sourness in it at all, which you can achieve, it won't even activate the saliva glands. That sourness activates something in your mouth to get the enzymes going to break down the bread and your mouth. All three taste great. But me, because I don't like a lot of sourness, I prefer the stiff starter and the one with the sugar in it. I would say, try the experiment at home and see what you like because this way, you can discover which flavor notes do you really like and that way, you can really start playing like, if you're making a rosemary lemon bread at home, you actually want just a touch of sourness of the bread to play along with the lemon zest flavor in the bread. It'll just taste delicious. If you want to add a sweet potato or purple potato to the bread, I would actually say less of our sourness works better because then you get more of the sweeter taste from the potatoes. You want to play around with the type of bread you're baking, including for Katya. For Katya, I actually like it less sour because I want to taste the sourness from the tomatoes and anything else I'm adding on top of it. In this way, you can really start expanding your culinary palette. It's really fun to play with, and it's not just a sourdough starter anymore, it's just another tool in your cooking that can really enhance what you have and take it to the next level. In the next lesson, I know we already talked about this before, but there's other things you can do to manipulate the sourness of your starter. In the next lesson, we'll be discussing what you can do and maybe some touch a little bit of history on it. We'll see. See you in the next lesson. 12. Manipulating Your Starter's Flavor: [MUSIC] Welcome back everyone, and thank you for sticking around and hanging on as we are now at Lesson 10. In Lesson 10, we'll be discussing sourness manipulation. Now in previous lessons, we had discussed how you can go about manipulating the sourness of your bread. We even baked three breads using three different levains and that gave us different flavors, but there are other things you can also do to manipulate the flavor of your sourdough starter, namely the sourness. One of them can be the feeding. If you're feeding your starter only once a day, it'll become inherently more sour because the lactic acid bacteria is becoming more present or more prevalent. If you feed a starter with a regular ratio of 1:1 and you're still feeding it twice a day, it will still be more sour because there's equal parts of water and flour present, so both the yeast and the lactic acid will be coexisting together. If you feed it more often, like three times a day, then you will actually start having less of a sour taste, and that's because you're not allowing the sourdough starter to get hungry, and if you keep feeding it, it means that the yeast is becoming stronger and becoming more dominant versus the lactic acid. As well if you create a stiff starter, like feeding it three times a day, a stiff starter can also enable a less sour taste because there's more flour than water, which means the yeast has a greater opportunity to feed and have more allies building up against the lactic acid. They're not going to go into a battle, it just means that there's more of the yeast versus the lactic acid. Those are some of the methods you can do, and of course, adding sugar or baking soda to your regular starter will also give it a less sour taste. Those are some things you can apply. If you really want a sour taste in your sourdough starter to be imparted into your bread, you can also add rye flour to your sourdough starter because the rye flour already has lactic acid present in the grain. There's many ways of doing it, which is why I'm saying experiment at home, share your results in the discussion area, share with us your thoughts, really play with it and understand, because not only are you learning to peak the flavors here and there, you're also building a relationship with your starter. That might just take the sourdough game to the next level for you and be able to use the starter itself for other baking needs, not just for bread but for sweet treats, for anything else that requires yeast once you understand how much of it you need for that baking purpose. Now, I did mention only feeding your starter once a day, please do keep in mind you are making it hungrier, which is what's imparting the sour flavor because the lactic acid is much more dominant than the yeast at that point, but it also means that the performance may vary in the bread baking because over time, the starter itself is not really thriving. Please do keep that in mind. I would say play around with it, do it by creating experimental starter, once you have your young healthy strong starter, then keep that aside, take a piece of it as inoculation builds, experiment starter or starters and see what you get out of it and what flavor profiles you get out of it. You don't need large amounts, you just need enough to be able to bake bread with it and use it. Because then if something goes wrong, at least your main starter that you created is safe and you can use it for bread baking whenever you want to. Here is the history lesson part. This is long before Brewer's yeast became the choice of yeast to use in bread baking. Prior to Brewer's yeast, bakers when they had those sourdough starters, their patrons had requested that they make their breads less sour. They weren't enjoying the sour taste. So what bakers used to do is feed their starters every four hours. Again, feed their starters every four hours, which meant they kept their starter on their bedside table or beside their pillow, depending on what they had furniture wise, and they would wake up every four hours to feed it. They didn't really get much sleep, and that's why when Brewer's yeast became available to use amongst bakers, they got on board really fast because that means that they could actually get some sleep without having to wake up consistently. Eventually, other yeasts came to be; baker's yeast, instant yeast, and sourdough starters slowly got phased out in most parts of the world, including North America. Sourdough starters were still around in other parts of the world, depending on where, but not as well known. Pandemic rolled around and people realized that yeast and other baking ingredients were not available, so they decided to go down the rabbit hole of making sourdough starters, which has been great because now scientists are actually looking more into it and understanding how it really works. Actually, use that phrase loosely, understanding how it works, they're still not sure of how all the microbes get in there and how they decide what stays and what goes, or even the amount of microbes that are out there, they're still discovering all of that. But it means that sourdough starters have come back. Not quite disappeared, but they became unknown for the last 150 years. I could understand why the bakers abandoned it, because every four hours just to keep the sourness at bay, that's a lot of work. But now that we can understand of how we want to be able to manipulate the flavor by performing hacks like adding sugar, or baking soda, or doing a stiff starter and all of that, you can actually change your baking schedule and your baking habits as a result. Next lesson, the next lesson is the final lesson. In that lesson, we're going to touch upon some things that maybe we haven't discussed or just briefly went over really quickly. See you in the next lesson. 13. The Good and The Bad: [MUSIC] Lesson 11. You have all made it. Thank you for sticking around honestly, because I am actually tired of talking, but I really want to impart all this information to you guys. If you've stuck around, that means you've actually gone through everything and hopefully will want to experiment at home. I really hope so because it can be a lot of fun. I enjoy doing it, and I like learning from doing things in a practical fashion. So I hope this inspires you to do that as well. In this lesson, we're going to go over some things that maybe we didn't quite touch upon or just went over quite quickly. I know I ramble quite a bit, so I just want to make sure that I haven't missed anything. First thing is smell. Your sense of smell. Get in the habit of sniffing your starter, there's nothing wrong with it. If anything, it tells you of what's happening in there. If it smells like fermentation, it's a good thing, it's doing something really great in there. Certain flours will also influence the scent or the fragrance that's coming off the starter. Only way to know that is to play around with it. If it smells cheesy, something has gone wrong, and I guarantee you from experience, you cannot revive it, so just chuck it and start a new starter. Or if you were smart and did like what I did, you have your mother starter healthy, off to the side, uncontaminated and it's just the levain that's gone bad or your experimental starter that's gone bad. If it has an acetone smell like a nail polish remover smell, it's a very distinct scent and is extremely pungent in terms of when you sniff your starter, it really invades your nose. Something also has gone wrong in that one and I would advise you to throw it out. I do not recommend you using it at all. Next one is color. Some starters, and it has happened to mine as well, you may see a grayish color on the top layer, not to be confused with hooch, hooch is in a liquid form. This is just the top layer of your starter, has a bit of a grayish color. That just means it's been oxidized, and I've discovered that when using fresh milled flour. With just regular store-bought flower that's unbleached, I have not seen that, but with fresh milled flour I have and I found out that it's just oxidizing. If you don't like the look of it, just scrape it off and use what's underneath it or you can keep it. It's up to you, it's not harmful. Hooch is the one that's in liquid form, which is a blackish gray color liquid sitting on top of your sourdough starter. You can either pour it off or you can mix it back in. No one has come across any issues and I don't know if it changes the flavor. I have actually not come across hooch, so I can't even show you an example of it, I am so sorry. But there are a lot of examples of it on the web where you can see what hooch looks like and no one has come across any issues with it. Again, you can either part off or mix it back in. Mold, you know what mold looks like. You will definitely know what mold will look like when you see it on your sourdough starter. If you see that, please just throw out the starter. I cannot advise anyone to just scrape off the top layer and use what's underneath because I don't know what it would do. Molds are just a tricky fungi that we don't know what would happen if you would ingest it, so I cannot advise people to just scrape it off. I would say throw it out and use another starter or start from scratch. There is a method called the scraping method. I don't have any experience using it, but I know there are people who use it. It has been tried and tested and people swear by it. A scraping method basically means that when you have a starter and you're getting ready to bake, this is not a levain, this is a starter. You're getting ready to bake. How do I describe this? You just have a slightly larger amount of the starter than what you would need for baking. You take out what you need and all you're left with is just like scraping bits at the bottom of your jar. They just put a lid on and put in the fridge and use it for when you are ready to bake again. I don't use that method because what if something goes wrong and I lose my starter, I'd have to make a new one from scratch. I've worked so hard with my three-year-old starter to get it strong and healthy and its mature state. I think it would work if you were baking every day or baking a lot because then you are actually feeding that scraping bit that's left behind and you're keeping it going. Also, I think, or logic dictates that it would work when your starter is already healthy to begin with. If it's young, right now, it needs food and nourishment to keep it going and to become stronger. If you do it when it's a little bit older, mature and stronger, then you don't have to feed it as often, you can probably get away with it. But for me, I'm just too afraid of losing my starter because I still do bake quite a bit at home and I don't want to worry about it so much. My stress level just goes up really high. If you do end up using the scraping method, please let us know in the discussion area how you're finding that method and if you really like it. I know it's a great way of not producing any waste, which is preferred over the discard method, which is why I ended up creating a smaller starter because I just wanted to minimize the discard method. But if you use a scraping method, please let us know. I mean, anything that you do and you want to share, go ahead and share in the discussion area below, we would love to read it and this builds a community and we can share information with each other and also make discoveries that other people may not have made. Who knows? Thank you for sticking around and making it this far. I hope you're inspired to experiment and see what you can do with it. I know your sourdough starter will be healthy and strong because you've taken notes from this class, and I hope this class has been engaging and entertaining and informative, most importantly, informative for all of you. Thank you for taking this class and have a good day. 14. Congrats, We Made It!: [MUSIC] Congratulations, everybody. We have all made it through all the lessons. I hope that this class, you are able to feel less intimidated and less fearful in creating a sourdough starter and understanding what's really happening inside of that particular container. When you think about it, it is self-managing. You don't really need to do anything aside from feeding it and making sure it has enough feed to survive throughout the whole day. The container or the ecosystem inside of that container is going through its own battles of survival of the fittest and sorting its own diplomacy out inside of it. All we need to do is make sure it has enough ammo to do what it need to do in order to stay healthy, strong, and mature over time. The stronger and more mature it gets, the less feeding that's actually required because there'll be able to sustain itself longer. I know, that sounds odd, but through my experimentation, that's what I have discovered. I would love to see what you discover. Please do feel free to share your thoughts and your discoveries in the discussion area, photos in the gallery page, just so that we can see what's going on with everybody else's starters and what you are finding. If something's not working out, then we can all help each other out. Sourdough starter was pretty much forgotten for about 150 years in most parts of the world. Until recently when the pandemic hit and now we are part of a discovery journey that it feels pretty good to be in, to be honest, because now you're learning something that you never thought you could do in your own kitchen. I find that really interesting, but that's just me. I like to discover new things and I hope that you do too. As well, please leave an honest review below. I would love to know what your thoughts are. I do read them and any feedback that you may have. That way, if I create a feature class, I can apply to it as well. I do read, I do listen. I feel like we can build a community where we share all of our own ideas and anything else that you may have. Should you like, please do follow me. I would really appreciate it because then you'll know what my next class will be up if I create another one. Thank you again for your time. I hope you are enjoying your sourdough starter and if you do give it a name, I would love to know. Take care for now. See you next time.