Crafting a Petite Sourdough Starter and Baking a Tiny Sourdough Loaf: A Manual for Small Batch Baking
# I’m Confident That Anyone Who Has Enjoyed a Truly Great Sourdough Has Considered Baking Sourdough at Home
Are you someone who enjoys sourdough? A while back, I wasn’t fond of it. This was during a time when people’s sourdough loaves were actually sour. Artisan bread has evolved significantly since then, and now sourdough is intricate, robust, and genuinely delicious.
## What is Sourdough?
Sourdough is a broad term for bread created using a wild yeast starter instead of commercial yeast. Despite its name, not every sourdough is sour. Sourdough starter can be utilized for various yeasted breads: sourdough cinnamon rolls, babka, and essentially anything that uses yeast can be made with sourdough.
## What is Yeast and What Makes it Wild?
Yeast are the tiny buddies that enliven your bread! Yeast is responsible for making breads airy and soft. It consumes the sugars found in flour and produces carbon dioxide, which causes bread to rise. Wild yeast is omnipresent around us. It exists in the air, in flours, on trees, on fruits; it’s everywhere.
## What Can I Bake With My Yeast/Sourdough Starter?
You can use sourdough starter/yeast to bake virtually anything! Sourdough bread, naturally, but also items like pizza dough, focaccia, artisanal loaves, sandwich bread, baguettes, pretzels, doughnuts, and the possibilities are endless. Anything that involves yeast is fair game.
## What About Sourdough Discard?
When you nourish your sourdough (more on that later), you will need to remove some of the sourdough mixture; otherwise, you’ll accumulate too much sourdough. The portion you remove is referred to as “discard.”
## What Can I Create With Sourdough Discard?
With a sourdough starter, there will always be discard; otherwise, you’ll end up with a massive quantity of active sourdough starter that could take over your kitchen. Even with a compact sourdough starter, discard will occur. However, the good news is that there are numerous delightful things you can prepare with it: pancakes, waffles, English muffins, crumpets, popovers/Yorkshire puddings, cake, banana bread, quick breads, crackers, muffins, corn bread, naan.
## Why You Should Create a Small Sourdough Starter
Currently, flour is a prized item. Since there will inevitably be sourdough discard, the wisest choice if you wish to bake sourdough is to create a small sourdough starter. Having a smaller starter leads to less discard and reduces the amount of flour required for feeding. A small starter will be more than adequate for a home baker to produce multiple loaves of bread because you can use your starter to generate a levain, which is an extension of your starter. The best part is that you won’t need a substantial amount of flour at the outset. It’s a low-investment, compact starter.
## How to Develop a Small Batch of Sourdough Starter
### What You Need
1. **Flour** – Starting a sourdough starter is simpler with freshly milled flour, but all-purpose flour will work fine too. If you happen to have whole wheat or rye flour available, a 50/50 blend of flours is optimal.
2. **Water** – Filtered room temperature water or tap water left out overnight to allow any chlorine to dissipate.
3. **A container** – A small, tall, straight-sided glass container is ideal so you can monitor exactly how much your starter expands and when it requires feeding. You’ll need a jar with a lid, but don’t secure the lid too tightly to allow gases to escape.
4. **Kitchen Scale** – A kitchen scale will ensure precision and assist you in baking uniform loaves.
5. **Rubber spatula** – While this isn’t strictly necessary, it makes mixing your starter and scraping the sides of your container much more convenient.
### Day 1
In the morning, prepare a flour mixture to nourish your starter: Take an empty container and combine 200 grams of all-purpose flour with 200 grams of rye or whole wheat flour. Set it aside. Place your jar on the kitchen scale and tare it (that is, subtract the weight of the jar).
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