Sourdough baking

You can ask for some of an established starter from someone, but it is very easy to start you own.

Just water, flour, container. You do not need boiled potato skins, unwashed chili stems, organic grape skins, eye of newt, or tears from a virgin. You can use those of course (never tried newt or virgin, they probably work too) the flavor will be different though.

Any flour will work, wheat, teff, sorghum, millet, buckwheat, on and on. It it's starch you can ferment it.

It may seem intimidating at first, but it's pretty easy once you start playing around with it.

You can use tap water with chlorine/ chloramine, rain water, bore water that is heavy in iron/ silicates/ calcium. Nothing special needed there.

When I want to make a new starter I just grab a jar, fill it 1/3 full with whatever flour, add water to somewhere below the top, put the lid on, give it a shake, then forget about it for a few days. 3 or 4 days later (depending on what flour was used, and what temperature the room is) I pour half of it out to use in crêpes or something, no need to toss it. Add more flour and water, shake, wait. If you see bubbles or clear liquid (Hooch, alcohol formation on top) it is working. Hooch can be shaken back in, no need to pour it off. Keep doing those steps for anywhere from 3 weeks to 2 months (lots of variables here) and you have a happy starter.

Once established you can freeze your starter. Activity will be slower of course when you use it again. You can also dry it on baking paper or plastic wrap, that works fine for about 10 days if you need to travel with it.

As Anthony Bourdain related in Kitchen Confidential, 'feed the bitch'. But also don't stress about it.

Good luck, it will work out, if you find virgin tears let me know because I want to try them.

Could try asking a good bakery around for a little starter.

Best way, I think is combining a small amount of flour and water to start, maybe 15 grams each. There's no reason to waste a lot. After that's had a couple days of room temperature in a jar, you can discard half (use in something else) and add 15 grams of flour and water again. A few iterations of that should get you a usable starter, but it takes a while for it to settle into being stable and predictable, maybe even months, depending on how often you feed it, and what temperature it's at. Put a rubber band around the jar where the level of the starter is when you feed it, and you can time how long it takes for it to ferment. Ideally, you'd feed it right when it gets to it's highest level, but no one probably does that unless they are a baker who wants super consistent dough.

The type of flour doesn't necessarily matter, but I would just use whichever flour you want to bake bread out of. Theoretically, the bacteria and yeast will reach some sort of equilibrium with the nutrients available in that specific flour.

Lots of guides online will have you keeping a fairly large volume of starter, and dumping it right into your dough. That's the way you'd want to do it if you were a pro baker who had to make bread every day, but for most of us, it's kinda wasteful. I keep about 60 grams of starter going in a little jar, and I just pull off half and step it up over one day to use the next. I never discard any starter.

Lastly, don't follow any guides that give you exact times for anything. It's all so dependent on your starter and the temperature in your kitchen. You need to only look at how it rises and adjust from there. Don't be too intimidated, though, people figured out sourdough thousands of years ago. The worst thing that happens is that it doesn't look as pretty as you'd like.

How did you get on?