How to Make a Sourdough Starter & Bread

This is my first time making a sourdough starter, and I figured it’d be a fun activity to try with the kids. In this blog post, I’ll be documenting our week-long experience making a sourdough starter and bread for the first time. 

Day 1:

• 1/2 cup of whole wheat flour 
• 1/4 cup of warm water

Simple, eh? We also used a clean pickle jar to hold our ingredients.

My cutie carefully poured 1/4 of a cup of warm water into a clean pickle jar.

Judging from the images I've seen online, this mixture looks a bit too dry, so we added two more tablespoons of warm water.

It's still a bit thick but slides off the fork with ease.

After mixing it thoroughly, here's the final result!

Day 2:

Despite being a little chilly in our home, the temperature has not prevented our sourdough starter from producing bubbles!

The sourdough starter will sit for another 24hrs then we'll feed it.

Day 3:

Time to feed our sourdough starter!

We filled the jar with a 1/2 c. of sourdough starter

then added a 1/4 c. of warm water and a 1/2 c. of flour. 

As you can see, I decided to use a different type of flour to feed our starter.

After adding more water, the consistency was a bit thicker than the pancake mix.

We decided to go ahead and name our sourdough starter, Loaf, and gave him some fun googly eyes :)

Day 4:

Our sourdough starter did not produce many bubbles, possibly because of the new flour we used and the smaller jar.

We continued our daily feedings and switched to our original wholemeal flour and larger jar.

• 1/2 cup of sourdough starter
• 1/2 cup of wholemeal flour
• 1/4 cup plus one tablespoon of warm water

Day 5:

We see more bubbles! Still not as bubbly as day two, but that's ok because we are doing this for the first time and will learn from our mistakes.

We are continuing with our daily feedings.

Day 6:

Mr Loaf is missing! I searched everywhere for him; then, about 45mins later, I found out that our youngest son had buried him in the backyard with a shovel. Thankfully, the lid was screwed on tightly, so no dirt got inside. We continued with the daily feedings:

• 1/2 cup of sourdough starter
• 1/2 cup of wholemeal flour
• 1/4 cup plus one tablespoon of warm water

Day 7: 

I'm not sure if our sourdough starter is ready because there aren't a ton of bubbles. The children and I will go ahead and bake some bread to see what happens. Either way, I'll be starting over again, so I want to give this batch "a go" before throwing it away.

Here is the recipe that we used:

• 1 cup of sourdough starter
• 1.5 cups of warm water
• 1/2 cups of sugar
• 1/2 cups of oil
• 1.5 tsp of salt
• 6 cups of all-purpose flour

Refrigerate dough overnight.

Place half of your freshly kneaded bread into a greased bread pan and bake at 350 degrees F (175 degrees C) for 40 to 45 minutes.

Things I would do differently next time:

• I would not have switched flours on day three or used a smaller jar
• I would not have used tap water
• I would have measured the dough inside the jar to see if it had risen
• I would put our sourdough starter in a safer place
• I need to figure out why the dough did not rise; maybe it was the type of flour we used?

Final results!

It's not very pretty, but it doesn't taste too bad. The worst thing about it is the texture. The crust is complex, and the middle is soft and dense. My husband describes the taste as a cross between soda bread and cornbread. He says that the sweet aftertaste is better than the initial taste, eeks; at least he was kind enough to try it.

Making bread was a fun experiment, even if it wasn't successful. I think it's important to teach children that mistakes are a part of the learning process and not take them too seriously. 

Second attempt!

We did a couple of things differently this time:

• We used  high-grade flour, which is excellent for making bread
• We used active dry yeast (an essential ingredient)
• After kneading the bread for at least 10mins it took shape in a large bowl for about 3 hours before refrigerating overnight 

The results tasted significantly better than our first attempt at making bread. It wasn't perfect, but edible.

For our third attempt at making bread, we decided to make pretzels for the first time. The shape was slightly off, but the taste and texture were divine. My family and I had at least two pieces each. The only things I did differently this time were kneading the dough a bit longer (15 mins) and letting it set out at room temperature for 4 hrs before baking it. We did not refrigerate it.

Lastly, here is a picture of the bread my son made this evening. Aww, he's too cute.

P.S. It's been one year and our sourdough starter is going strong!