Sourdough Starter Recipe

Make your own sourdough starter for home bread baking with our simple recipe

Making a sourdough starter is a way of creating a living wild yeast. You will need it to make our sourdough bread recipe. It is the ingredient that will cause your bread to rise and it is what gives sourdough its unique ‘sour’ flavour. This is a relatively quick starter to make compared with many methods. We favour this recipe as it’s both quicker and less wasteful.

Your starter will improve with age. As it gets older the flavour will develop, and the more that you feed it the more active it will become. We use Marriage's dark wholemeal rye flour. We have found that it works faster than white bread flour and will give your bread a darker colour. For consistent results ‘feed’ the starter at roughly the same time each day.

Remember, it does take time but it's much healthier than shop-bought bread. Even if it's spread with butter and one of our jams made from our jam recipe collection.

Ingredients

• 200g Marriage’s Dark Rye Wholemeal Flour

You will need:

• 1 litre container with a lid

Method

1. DAY 1 In the container, mix 100g rye flour with 100ml water to make the starter. Loosely place the lid on top and leave at room temperature.
2. DAYS2-4 Each day, feed the starter at around the same time, by mixing in 10ml water and 10g rye flour. Leave at room temperature with the lid placed on top. It will begin to bubble and grow.
3. DAY 5 The night before, or at least eight hours prior to making the bread, feed the starter with 70ml water and 70g rye our. Leave at room temperature. ✣ Don’t throw away the remainder; keep it in the fridge. While you’re not using the starter, feed it 10g rye flour and 10ml water every couple of weeks. Before using to make bread again, just repeat the Day 5 feed. You will be able to see if your starter is active, as it will grow and bubble. If you find that the starter is not very active, then simply repeat the Day 5 feed again. If your starter changes colour or grows mould, you may need to start again.