How to Feed Sourdough Starter with Recipe

Turn flour, water, and salt into delicious bread with these simple steps.

By Wren Everett
Updated on September 18, 2024
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by Wren Everett
Your sourdough starter will take about a week to get established.

Learn how to make sourdough starter from scratch, how to feed sourdough starter, and what makes it taste different depending on where you are.

Pulling loaves of homemade sourdough bread out of the oven is one of those timeless homestead experiences many of us yearn to recreate in our own modern lives. Whether you live off-grid in the mountains or in a 15th-floor apartment, it’s a skill you can readily learn, even if you’re just getting started with baking. All you need to do is give yourself a bit of time to learn how to team up with one of humanity’s oldest allies: wild yeast.

Yeast is likely one of the first organisms ever captured and “domesticated,” so to speak, by humans. For thousands of years, we’ve employed it to ferment our food and drink, both to make it last longer and to improve its taste and digestibility. In the modern age, however, many of us have been raised with little or no knowledge of how to ferment, and we don’t know how to get started. In this article, I’ll explain how to capture wild yeast to make your very own sourdough starter, teach you how to maintain it, and share my homestead’s recipe for a satisfying whole-grain sourdough bread that’s easy to make and even easier to eat.

I hope you’ll notice that the tone of this article is decidedly relaxed in nature – that’s on purpose. I believe good bread is anyone’s inheritance if they just take the time to learn some basic steps. I know there are some specific dictates on how to churn out picture-perfect loaves, but sourdough bread can also be very forgiving, flexible, and adaptable. You just need flour, water, salt, and time.

How to Make Sourdough Starter From Scratch

When I first started learning about sourdough, I got the sense it was a difficult endeavor, and I was intimidated. I didn’t yet understand that many modern publications needlessly complicate the creation of cultured wheat batter. They say you need raisins, or juniper berries, or midnight deals with infernal supernatural powers to get a starter started. The truth is, capturing wild yeast is so simple that anyone with a bit of flour and water has already done the bulk of the work.

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