Sourdough Maintenance- Scaled Down Ken Forkish or different method?
I am brand new to sourdough, and am currently on day 5 of starting my sourdough starter which I suppose can now be considered mature/active. I used Ken Forkish’s starter, and although I’ve seen several posts about scaling down what he advises for his starter maintenance, I was wondering if anyone could relay the exact grams they have been successful with. My goal is to try and bake bread every weekend. I have been keeping my starter in the oven with the door cracked and the light on to keep it 78 degrees. This is costing me a fortune! (Haha, jk, but this has to change!)
1) to bake once a week, most likely from his cook book, what exact amounts would you suggest? The goal would be to transition it to a large glass weck jar so I don’t have to make room in the fridge for a 6 qt container. Sheesh
2) I know he uses an 80% hydration starter.. should I switch to a 100% hydration starter? What is everyone else’s opinion on this?
3) am I good to just put it in the fridge right now???
no judgment! I am brand new to this! Haha
I suggest not worrying about exact grams, etc. Any amounts in a fairly wide range will work well. Many people, including me, keep a 100% hydration starter. Once the starter is active and in good shape, keep it in the refrigerator unless you want to refresh it 2 or 3 times each day. In the fridge, it will probably be able to go 3 days, maybe more, without a refresh.
For baking once a weekend, I would take the starter out, discard extra, and refresh it with 3 oz/90g each of all purpose flour and water. Do this either Friday evening or Saturday morning. At a room temperature of roughly 72 - 76 deg F, the starter will probably be ready to use in four or five hours. Then either make your dough or refrigerate the starter until the next morning and make your dough then.
Simple - take a little out of each batch (whatever the hydration is) and keep out for a couple days (before use is best) - along with the fridge for a couple. Enjoy!
Christy,
As with so much of bread baking, there are dozens, likely thousands of ways to approach maintaining your starter. I’ll share the minimalist way I’ve been doing it since it was first suggested to me by the obsessed genius Kristin Dennis @FullProofBaking.
I store 150 g (Kristin keeps even less) of starter in a small jar in the refrigerator. I make a batch of starter by taking 50 g of a lively levain I’ve built for a batch of bread and mixing that with 50 g of water and 50 g of flour. Once we’ll-mixed, this goes in the fridge until I’m ready to make bread.
36 hours before I want to mix dough:
Depending on time constraints or how well I planned I will occasionally start the first generation with 10 or more grams of starter. Likewise if I want to end up with more levain, I will increase the water and flour additions to either or both of the 2nd and 3rd generations. So if I’d wanted 350 g of levain (300 for my dough plus 50 more for a new batch of starter) I’d normally just feed gen 3 with 140 g each water and flour. In a time pinch I might also go with just 2 generations. When my jar of seed starter gets down to 50 g or every few months, I make a new batch.
The beauty of this method is you only have a small cache of seed starter in the fridge and daily maintenance is not required. Forkish has a bakery so it’s not unrealistic for him to perform daily starter maintenance. I don’t bake every day. For me it would be a burden.
I should also mention that I have left the starter unused for over 3 months and it still perked up when fed, though I may have gone through 5 or 6 generations to get a really lively, perky levain again.
Good luck with your sourdough adventure. You’ll find lots of great reference material and helpful advice here.
Phil
You’ll get many replies. My own routine for weekly making is to dtore about 25g stiff whole wheat starter in the fridge. I find stiff starters take longer to go bad. Each week i take 7-10g of this and mix with 40g flour and 20g water for 12 hours. Then i add 140 of flour and 100g water. About 280g of stiff levain.