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Keeping a healthy starter

Lauren

We eat a lot of bread in our house. With seven children and a busy farm to manage, I love the flexibility sourdough baking gives me. Sourdough isn’t a flavor- it’s a method, and one that allows me to avoid using commercial yeast in favor of harvesting the wild yeast in my home environment. So many accounts make sourdough seem inaccessible- but truthfully, our homes are already hosts to a wide variety of natural yeasts. They want to live. And with patience and proper feeding ratios, they will thrive with whatever conditions you ask them to.

I know. That seems crazy. I didn’t believe it myself when we moved to our high altitude desert climate. I was so sure my starter was doomed to be weak and sluggish, that it would need extra support like a heated mat to keep it alive and thriving in my 50*F kitchen…but I was wrong. It just took time and attention to adapt my starter to my routine and my environment. Now I have a happy and active starter and beautiful, well-risen loaves, with feeding only once every 2-3 days.

I keep a well-fed starter on my kitchen counter, and I bake every other day- feeding my starter only when I am preparing dough for the next day’s baking.

Here’s what that schedule looks like for me:

Monday night: feed starter, prepare 2-3 recipes of sourdough (usually 1-2 sandwich loaves and a batch of pizza dough)

Tuesday morning: shape, rise, and bake sandwich loaves, place pizza dough in ziplock bags for the lunches for the week

I find that I have the best success with a small amount of starter compared to a much higher amount of flour and water. To keep a solid amount of starter for frequent baking, I feed 70g of starter with 125g each of flour and water. However…if I notice my starter is sluggish or slack as opposed to happily rising with big, stretchy bubbles inside, I feed the tiniest bit of starter- like 5-10g- with 125-150g each of flour and water. (I use organic white wheat bread flour, but I’ve used organic unbleached all-purpose flour for years in the past with great results. Whatever flour you use- just watch how it reacts to your environment with feeding regularly and in good ratios, and you’ll find a good routine.)

The microbes in that little amount of starter receive a huge boost in a larger feeding, and the results show a much more robust and active starter.

The other factor benefiting healthy starter growth is time. I love when things come together quickly. Unfortunately, working with a starter is much like getting plants off to a good start. You need to be both consistent and patient. While many sourdough experts will share methods to make your own starter in 7 days, in reality, I’ve made my own starter from scratch more than a few times, and they become the healthiest versions of themselves between 14-20 days. And while you may be able to bake with the starter you get prior to that 2 week maturity point, it’s quite possible, even likely, that you’ll be frustrated with the quality of the loaves that come from those bakes.

And since it takes 3 weeks to form a habit, it’s pretty easy to see why someone who starts sourdough only to be discouraged by poor results in the early stages might want to quit- all before the beauty of the process takes hold.

So if you’re just getting a starter going and you haven’t found the results you’re looking for, don’t give up! With a good routine of feeding your starter and an understanding that it may be closer to three weeks before it’s really thriving an happy, you’ll be well on your way to baking beautiful happy loaves.

Breakfast Favorites, Planning, Sourdough

Meal planning: breakfast

Lauren

I’m a planner. As a mother of seven children, I have to be. And with Mike frequently traveling cross-country for work, the kids and I are typically responsible for all the farm chores before we start school each day during the week. Milking cows and goats, feeding 500+ lbs of hay to everyone, and refilling water troughs is just part of what we do, all before 8 am.

I know without a good plan we could easily drag the morning out and have very little accomplished before having to start evening chores. My goal is to have chores done by 8:00/8:30 and then have a nice hot breakfast together before starting our school lessons. Eating from the bounty of our farm means we eat pretty seasonally, but even with that in mind I can stick us to a pretty simple method: protein, fat, fruit or veggie, carb. With the days getting shorter and shorter, our hens are laying less and less. This means we can’t have eggs on the menu every morning.

Luckily we also plan our butchering for the fall- so our freezers are full of breakfast sausage and beef bacon. Our protein options rotate between beef or deer sausage or beef bacon, eggs, and greek yogurt. Then I typically build out the rest of our breakfast with a combination of sourdough or oatmeal with cultured butter and a fruit we’ve preserved- spiced peaches or apples, applesauce, or frozen berries.

Some of us like a more savory breakfast, so I’ll change things up and make a quiche loaded with veggies and herbs and cheese, or serve breakfast tacos with salsa and avocados in the summer, and breakfast potatoes with sausage and peppers in the winter.

Once I have solid ideas and options, I create a fill-in-the-blank style plan that looks like this:

Sunday: quiche with cut fruit;

Monday: yogurt with granola and chicken sausage;

Tuesday: buttered sourdough toast and jam with scrambled eggs;

Wednesday: beef bacon with roasted potatoes and sliced pears;

Thursday: sourdough waffles with applesauce and greek yogurt;

Friday: sausage bagels with frozen berries;

Saturday: pumpkin donuts with greek yogurt or breakfast burritos

I try to rotate through whatever seasonal items we have here on the farm and a combination of whatever is in our grocery store. The cost of groceries is so expensive now that I’ve been particularly choosy about only buying items I KNOW my crew will eat. Last year Mike bought me a set of donut pans from King Arthur Baking and they have made it so fun and simple for us to make sourdough discard donuts- I rotate on Saturdays between muffins and donuts and the kids love those. With eggs being in lower supply, baking something for everyone with a recipe that uses just one or two eggs is incredibly economical.

I also make our yogurt using my instant pot- which is an enormous savings for us and lets us eat yogurt several times a week for breakfasts. Cora (my 14 year old) makes our granola each week on Sundays, and my boys take turns helping me with the sourdough. If the plan is written out a week in advance, it’s easy to identify what we need to buy, what we need to thaw, and what we need to prep ahead– and that means smooth sailing for breakfasts in the mornings.

What about you? Do you plan breakfasts? I’ll be sharing our lunch and dinner meal plans as well- because I can do a lot of things, but winging it isn’t one of them.

xoxo~

Lauren