
“There’s no need for any waste in bread making, especially if you’re willing to cook and bake other things,” says Tara Jensen, the baker behind Smoke Signals, a sourdough baking school in Asheville, North Carolina, and author of A Baker’s Year. Triantafillou started baking his own bread about five years ago for fun, and because, at least for him, naturally leavened breads taste better and are easier on the digestive system. “For home bread bakers who don't have to make identical bread every day, the dirty little secret is that you can use a mature starter that's not at its absolute peak and the bread will still work,” says Niko Triantafillou, an avid home baker whose full-time job is at Citigroup. In other words: If you have a sourdough starter that you only use occasionally to bake bread, you simply don’t need to feed it every day. That’s how long some bakers-home hobbyists and professionals-say their bread starter survived without any attention. Then we roll the bins into the fridge overnight.” By the next morning, the good microbes have done their job in those big bins, growing into new batches of robust starter.īut, if you’re not running a massive bakery operation, and only need a loaf or two to get through the week-or, don’t feel like baking daily or even weekly-do you really need to keep feeding and throwing out some of your starter every day?Ģ weeks. When the tub is low, we mix in equal parts flour and water and leave it outside for an hour to get the process activated, following a method learned from John de Cuevas, the late scientist who gave us his starter. “We use most of it up throughout the day, for hundreds of loaves. “We keep our starter in 80-gallon tubs,” says Carissa Waechter of Carissa’s the Bakery in East Hampton, New York. A baker always reserves a portion of their starter for the next batch of bread.

Using some of the starter to bake bread with is the same as “discarding” it, for the purposes of keeping a starter alive and well.

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Some of it gets mixed with additional flour and water, plus salt and perhaps other ingredients (like whole grains, oil, olives, dried fruit, nuts, or spices), kneaded into a dough, left to rise, and then baked into a lofty loaf. “Every time I send excess active starter down the drain, I feel a pang of regret.”Īfter the initial start-up period, a regularly refreshed starter can be used to make bread.
