Mrs Sambar asked me if we have any documentation of our Sourdough journey, and truth is, we don’t. Sambar Chronicles (although has been planned for a while), wasn’t actually launched till well into our sourdough journey. So we never wrote about it. But since we have friends who asked us about how to maintain a sourdough, I thought I would document it.
Sourdough is easy to start. Basically you just need flour (any flour, wheat, rye etc) and water. Sourdough is a natural yeast culture, so nothing fancy at all! We followed the Joshua Weissman video for the recipe originally, but honestly, he can be a bit much. Since I learned about Sourdough, I found the Food52 videos awesome. I love learning from experts and Sarah Owens has such a calm voice, she makes me less anxious about the whole thing.
So how do I feed this baby?
Sourdough is super easy to maintain, despite what people may tell you! If you keep sourdough in the fridge, you basically have to plan to use like 70-240g per week. 240g is one cup of sourdough. Keep in mind that Sourdough is half flour and half water. One cup of flour is 120g, so a cup of sourdough is double that (half flour and half water).
Use up your starter with all the crazy sourdough recipes on our blog (pancakes, crepes, waffles, milk bread, sourdough bread, popovers/yorkshire puddings, cinnamon swirls, banana bread, you name it!). We have never had a problem using up some starter on the weekend.
Once we use up some starter, now we have to feed the mother starter. We do that by adding as much as we need for our next use, using the same proportion of half and half. So if I use less starter one week, then I feed it less to end up with the same amount the next week. If I use up most of the starter, I will feed it with 150g flour + 150g water.
I usually stick it back in the fridge an hour after feeding, and take it out of the fridge either on Friday night or early on Saturday morning in order to make some breakfast item for Saturday breakfast.
How much can you use?
Sourdough starter is a bit nuts. It’s next to impossible to kill the thing. I’ve had times I’ve pretty much scraped it out almost completely, and it comes right back once you feed it! I’ve had times where I haven’t touched it for two weeks, and it gets this scuzzy water at the top, but even then, when I just throw out most of the stuff and feed it, it comes right back. So in short, use as much as you need! No stress!
Storing – how?
Sorry, my brain is fried. So you can store it out on the counter, which makes it happy and frolicky. You can store it in the fridge to slow down its work, and at extreme, if you know you’re not going to use it for a while, spread some starter on a parchment sheet, and freeze it. You can toss it into a new feeding and it will come right back! Very hard to kill the buggers.
Whats the difference between discard and active starter?
So the process of yeast is very much like kids. Both are voracious. So when a starter is fed, it goes crazy, and starts eating all the sugars. The byproduct is gas, so when you stick it out at room temperature, you can see it getting all active by seeing all the bubbles in the starter. This is great for when you want to make fermented sourdough items (e.g. bread).
Once the sugars have been mostly consumed, the culture runs out of food. At that point, the taste is the most “sour” and it sort of thins out and loses some of the bubbliciousness. This is discard. This is used for things where we are cooking the batter and not waiting for it to ferment (pancakes, waffles, most things other than bread).
So whats his name?
Sam – Sam, the sourdough starter. Yes, really.