Kitchen Notes: Sourdough Starter

Part of the reason to make your own is so that you don't buy the cup of refrigerated starter from some (un)known company at the grocery store for what amounts to a lot of time and an inexpensive amount of flour. I probably should have started this in say.. summer, when the ambient temperature of my kitchen was in the 70s. Alas, I suppose it'll take longer than the week proposed by King Arthur Flour. They have a non-refrigerator/non-freezer method of preserving your starter too. Which, by the looks of it, reads like it is better than the valuable storage space in the refrigerator/freezer...basically you take the finished sourdough starter as if you were going to use it and dry it out at room temp across several days on parchment paper, then store the dried starter in an airtight container.

Anyhow. Back to the starter. I am not reposting KAF's instructions, but I am going to detail what I am doing with this attempt. Previous tries at sourdough breads have resulted in my killing the starter after I used a portion of it to bake a sourdough bread. It feels bad to waste food ingredients; but alas, you can use discarded starter in a number of recipes that call for bread dough: pizza crust, pretzels, etc.

Day 1, Jar 1:
1/2 c dark rye flour + 1/2 c warm water

Day 2, Jar 1:
Half removed, added 1 scant cup AP flour + 1/2 c warm water

Day 2. Jar 2 (essentially, now I have two Jar 1s):
Jar1 Discard + 1 scant cup AP flour + 1/2 c warm water

Day 3, Jar 1 & Jar 2:
Half removed from each jar and placed in Jar 3 (which will be refrigerated for later use)

and so on, so far, I am only on Day 2.

Sourdough Starter Batch #1

Hopefully it'll ferment in time to make some loaves for this weekend's BBQ. This particular starter recipe doesn't make you feed it every day. This is fortunate because the slacker in me doesn't want to do that. Instead, the fermentation time is 4-8 days and you need to check the starter for signs that it is not doing well, like the entire mixture turns pink (bad sign! toss it out and start over). You only start to feed the starter once you take a cup of it out for a bread recipe.

Starter Recipe Ratio

1 pkg (2 1/4 tsp) active dry yeast
2 c all purpose unbleached flour
2 c warm water (between 105 and 110 degrees F)

Maintenance Ratio

1 c warm water
1 c all purpose unbleached flour
+ a pinch of sugar

I started the starter in a large wide-mouth glass jar and covered it with a kitchen towel secured by a rubber band. At the moment, it is sitting in a corner of the kitchen counter.