The Why's and The How's

How It Started...

After months (almost a year) of wanting to try sourdough, I finally did it! I started doing some reading in July. And with Youtube and Google, there was information overload. Everyone has a different approach to make their own starter.

Basically a starter is flour and water, left to ‘ferment’ over a period of time. Even though there is only two ingredients, there are many variables to them.

Let’s start with flour… All-purpose flour, bread flour, wholemeal flour, whole wheat flour (Are they the same? Still can’t tell the difference up to today), rye flour, and a whole lot of grains that can be turned into flour. And there are some bakers who call for a mix of two types of flour.

Now to the water. Some used unsweetened pineapple juice, others just filtered water. This is a much easier choice for me. Unsweetened pineapple juice sounds like a run to the supermarket, and that calls for extra work. So filtered water shall do for me.

Next, how much should I start with? Some use 1 cup flour and ½ cup water (after some googling, that’s around 120g flour with 120g water), others 60g flour with 60g water, some 50g flour with 50g water, some 3tbsp flour with 2tbsp water, and the list is endless. But the most common one is equal amount of water and flour. And I went with that.

Again, this whole project started as an experiment. No idea if this will work or not. And so after doing some maths and comparing the amount of flour that I’ll need, I decided to go with 20g wholemeal flour and 20g water. (Yups! Sounds a lot lesser than what others are using. But I’m “kedekut” like that, and don’t want to waste in case this whole experiment doesn’t work.)

Disclaimer: I'm totally new at this. Not sure if I can replicate this cause I have only done it once. But this is what works for me in the Malaysia weather. And keeping a record here, just in case I might want to do it again!

But if you’ll like to try sourdough and don’t want to start from scratch, I don’t mind sharing some of BoBo (my starter) with you. Just that he is quite new (D.o.B.: 7th August 2020) and you’ll have to come and collect it from me 😁.