I made my own starter with yeast and WW flour a month ago and loved using it with the sourdough bread recipe from breadtopia.
I then started the process of making this starter with pineapple juice and WW flour.
Nothing happened until step 2’s 48 hr period at about the 45th hour. OMG all of a sudden it started bubbling like my other starters.
Sooo don’t give up! It does work and well!
I can’t wait to use it in bread .
And here is the resulting bread! Delicious!
Wanted to thank you for this easy to use and healthy starter recipe. After two failed attempts, i used this recipe for starter and it worked beautifully. The result is Birtha (my starter’s name, because she gives birth to lovely bread loaves), who just celebrated her first “birthday.”
I’ve included pictures of two loaves (one is a white sourdough and the other is a light rye bread that is modeled after my Slovak grandmother’s bread).
Beautiful! 
My storage jar came with a rubber gasket. One of your videos says to not use it for storage. Do I only use it for starting the sourdough starter?
I have a question, when using the fruit, do you recommend using pineapple “meat” juice? or the juice obtained when boiling pineapple’s peel?
Hi, what other liquid can be used besides pineapple juice? With our stay at home orders and no yeast to be found when I do go, I would like to get started but have no pineapple juice.
thanks,
The original point of the pineapple juice was to make the developing sourdough culture somewhat more acidic than the approximately pH neutral dough paste you get when you mix flour and water together. You can actually use almost anything that will lower the pH a bit, and the person (Debra Wink) who originally came up with pineapple juice tried a bunch of different things and found that pineapple juice worked the best of the various things she tried.
You can actually just skip the pineapple juice and use unchlorinated water. It will just take a couple days longer to develop and go through some possibly confusing stages of bubbling (due to the “wrong” microbes) and then seeming to “die” before it turns into proper sourdough starter.
Orange juice and apple cider are a couple other possibilities.
You can read the original research here:
You can use flour and unchlorinated water only.
Day 1, mix 60g water and 60g starter
Day 2, add to the mix, 60g water and 60g starter (you’ll have maybe seen some bubbling)
Day 3, repeat (note it will look sleepy or dead, like nothing is happening)
Day 4, repeat (note it will look sleepy or dead, like nothing is happening)
Day 5, repeat, back to bubbing
Day 6, split the jar into two jars: discard and 60g starter. Feed the 60g starter, 60g water and 60 flour. It should expand quite a bit, possibly double. Use it.
I see @homebreadbaker is in the midst of replying. He may have totally different instructions. @anon44372566 might also. The beauty of sourdough starter is that there are many ways to make it, just like there are many ways to bake bread.
What you will need…
Make a low hydration golf ball size dough with the whole wheat flour and about 60% water.
Bury it in AP or bread flour inside the paper bag (or other receptacle). Seal the bag and leave it on top of the fridge for 5-6 days. After which it should have expanded and formed a hard crust.
Cut into the dough ball and scoop out the gloop inside.
Feed it! Voilà a starter is born. It might need a couple of feeds to bring it up to strength but it’ll be viable and doesn’t need daily attention.
As Melissa says… There are many ways.
During this lock down, my son a 10 year old and myself have just done the first step. We have used pineapple juice with little bit sugar as we couldnt get of of unsweetened pineapple juice. We will update on how it goes!
Have been wanting to do a sour dough bread for years, i think i have been following your website and videos for over 4 years now.
We run our own bake house where we make our own instant yeast breads.
Hope our trial makes me take courage to venture in sour dough breads
Do you have any organic fruit, dried or fresh, in the house?
I’ve been thinking of making a sourdough starter as I love sourdough bread. However, I’m allergic to pineapple so I don’t want to use that. Can you suggest any substitutes? Thanks!
You don’t need pineapple juice. It just gives it a kick in the right direction. Flour and water is just fine.
I first baked sourdough about 50 years ago. I would take a 1 quart bottle about 1/4 filled with starter and a bag of flour when I went camping. In the morning I would add about 8 oz water from the river I was camping next to and a couple handsful of flour. Shake it up good and let it sit. Come dinnertime I would grease my “clamshell mess kit pan” and pour the mix in, throw it in the fire and prepare the rest of my dinner. When everything else was ready I would pull the clamshell out of the fire, open it up and there was my fresh bread.
If I wanted pancakes for the next morning I would feed the starter along with a handful of sugar and let it grow overnight. I would pour this into the fry pan and make pancakes/sweetbread for breakfast.
Recently got back to baking sourdough, at home not at a campsite. Many of the instructions for making a starter seemed WAY too complicated, “start with 75 ml water and add 200 gr flour, after 5 hours dump out half and add 125 gr flour, stir every 3 hours …”
Here’s how I made my starter: (All “sit” time is on the counter, not the fridge)
Get a 1 qt jar with a snap lid and rubber seal. Throw out the rubber seal.
Put about a half cup water (filtered is best, like a Britta) and half cup flour, mix and let sit.
After about 12 hours, more or less, add a quarter cup of water and half cup of flour, mix and sit.
After 12 to 24 hours give a sniff test. It should start to smell a little sharp. If not, give it another 12 hours.
Add another quarter cup flour and mix. (Don’t worry about another sniff test, it’s either ready or it’s not) This will be rather stiff. That’s okay. Use a sharpie to mark the level on the jar.
Let it sit for up to 12 hours. Check every 2 or 3 hours to see if it’s growing or getting bubbly. (This is the fun part.) If it’s not growing give it a little more time. After another 6 hours or so you might want to add a little more flour (max a quarter cup) and just enough water to be able to mix it in.
About 6 to 12 hours before you plan to start making your bread add a little more flour (a small handful will suffice) and stir it in.
This comes to 48 to 60 hours from start to starter.
If you want to know my recipes let me know. Otherwise I’ll leave that to the more qualified bakers.
good luck
I just finished my 5 days of whole wheat sourdough starter and it’s working well.
This was the starter at 7:30 this morning.
This is the starter at 11:30… I think I got it.
Thanks…
Does this get stored in the fridge, or sit out on the counter now?
Certainly looks ready. Can probably be stored in the fridge now but its a good idea to have a successful bake before doing so. Further feeds will continue to strengthen your starter. When ready store in the fridge but fed and activated. Not to be refrigerated as soon as its fed as you wish to build up a good yeast population before before its put into hibernation. Fed and doubled is good.
P.s. That’s very good for 3 hours. Try a small loaf with it now.
Dear Eric, thank you for all of the wonderful information. I use you site for the majority of my baking. I have reviewed all of your materials on starter management but still have a question about how to get the starter down to a minimum. On another site, I have read about using just a teaspoon of cold starter straight out of the fridge rather than the more frequently used methods you describe here. Is it possible and does it work in the same way? Have you done any videos or comparisons? Also, I have read on one site that you can leave your starter “dormant” in the fridge without feeding for weeks (3-4) at a time and it will still be ok. Is this true?
Some information at Breadtopia:
Hi …I would firstly like to thank you a lot for this recipe. I am only a beginner at baking and this is an easy recipe for me that works pretty well.
After making the starter once, I used it for a few breads. Then I moved to a different city and now I am making a fresh batch of the starter. I had a doubt regarding the whole wheat flour that I am using for the starter.
Right now the flour I am using has a slightly coarse texture. It’s the one I used for my first starter too. But now it’s about to get over and I got a different pack of flour (king Arthur whole wheat flour). The new flour is smoother. Because of that the starter becomes extremely liquidy and I think wrong in texture. Can you suggest if I need to change the water quantity for the new smoother texture flour? Should it be less than 1/4 cup for 1/2 cup flour?
Thank you.
