I have tried and failed with sourdough twice in recent years. I am hoping the third time will be a charm in 2025.
I have always admired the beauty of sourdough bread, and in recent years, I have come to greatly admire the self sufficiency of it. I bake with yeast a lot, and while I try to stay stocked up, the yeast shortage of 2020 lingers in my mind. The idea of having a source of infinite bread is appealing to me–and seems like magic for sure!
But, oh, how I struggle!
The first time, we named our sourdough, but it didn’t live very long at all. The second time, I told my son we had better not name it. It did live longer–several weeks, in fact–but I couldn’t even get it to the right state to cook with, and it eventually died.
As you may know, I try to make New Year’s resolutions related to my homesteading goals for the year because I am always trying to learn just a little bit more, and I made sourdough bread one of my goals for 2025. During the holidays, I bought myself two starters from King Arthur Baking, determined that I could surely make one of them live. The little jars of starter came with instructions, and after reading through the instructions, I am worried the issue I have might be temperature.
The instructions say to keep the starter at a certain temperature all the time, but the temperature in our house fluctuates a lot. It can get pretty chilly in here in the winter and pretty hot in here in the summer. Dear readers, if you know sourdough, do you think that might be why my sourdough starter can’t get going?
And, if you know sourdough, do you have any advice related to temperature? And, well, do you have any advice in general? I remember reading in Michael Pollan’s A Botany of Desire that he struggled at first with sourdough, and I feel I might be overthinking it in the same way. Please tell me it’s simple and that I can do this. I need some of that magic in my kitchen.
My other homesteading resolutions are to build a clothes line and plant apple trees in the places where we had to take down our giant pines. Our property is so changed without those big pine trees. I miss them so much, but that’s another story. We are planning to take advantage of the newly-found openness on our homestead to plant more fruit trees. Oh, and I think this is the year we may try to build a covered run for the chickens and ducks. The bird flu has us more than a little worried. But that’s another story too.
What are your homesteading resolutions for the year? Do you have any goals toward self-sufficiency for the upcoming year? I would love to hear about them.
photo credit: Jennifer Burk, Unsplash
First, Crystal, I need to tell you how much I enjoy reading your daily posts. Your beautiful writing about the details of life is so engaging! Putting on my microbiologist’s hat now. Your sourdough starter is a complicated little universe filled with all sorts of different little critters (using highly technical terminology here) that coexist in an ecology that is unique to that little universe. If you alter the conditions of that universe (e.g. fluctuating temperatures) the ecology will go out of whack and may entirely collapse. So, yep, keeping a stable temperature is pretty important. Most starters, from what I’ve read, are happiest with temperatures consistently between 75 & 80. Maybe the easiest way to keep the temperature stable it to get one of those countertop heating mats that home brewers use. They cost about twenty bucks, and run at about 25 watts, so don’t use a ton of electricity. I’m looking at one on Amazon right now – it’s called a “Home Brewing Fermentation Heating Pad.” I’ll bet it would solve your problem.
I have no words for how thankful I am for this advice! I am looking up this heating mat right this minute!!!!!!
I know nothing about sourdough except I love to eat it 🙂 We are blessed with a local farmer who bakes and brings to sell at our country store, with beautiful designs like wheat on top. It is good enough to live on, well, with a bit of cheese n honey, an egg or two. Keep us posted
Oh, this makes me want to learn how to make beautiful sourdough loaves!
I’ve been baking with sourdough for over 10 years. I think it’s very easy to get overwhelmed with all of the media and forget that people have been baking with sourdough for hundreds of years. I keep my starter in the fridge. I take it out Saturday morning and use most of it to start pizza dough (which sits until dinner). I feed the remaining starter with 1/2 cup flour and 1/3 cup water. In the evening I start a batch of bread (to bake the next day). I feed the starter again and put it back in the fridge until the next week. If you want to bake more frequently, you’ll need to feed (and discard) on a daily basis, and that’s when fluctuating temperatures might be a problem. If it gets too warm, it will eat through the flour you feed it more quickly. Keeping it in the fridge negates that issue.
Nora, thank you so much for this advice! I keep reminding myself that this is how humans have been baking bread forever, but I can’t seem to get mine going. Do you keep yours in the fridge when you first got it started? I am so determined but so scared to waste another starter. I hope you see this question and have some advice about getting it started!