Flavour & Fire
The Sourdough Journal
Your First Steps with Sourdough
Everything you want to know before making your first starter.
So, you want to make sourdough.
Perhaps it started with a loaf you saw somewhere. A dark, crisp crust, an airy crumb and that unmistakable, slightly sour aroma. Maybe you have been wondering for a while why so many people keep a jar of flour and water on their kitchen counter, or perhaps you simply want to learn how to make good bread from simple ingredients.
Whatever brought you here, you do not need to know everything before you begin. Sourdough is exactly the kind of process in which many things only start to make sense once you have seen, smelled, felt and experienced them for yourself.
There is a starter to make, dough to mix, time to give it and plenty to discover along the way. You do not have to understand it all in a single day.
This is your starting point.
Before you begin
At its heart, sourdough is surprisingly simple. Flour, water and time form the starting point, but behind that simple combination, much more is happening than you might expect at first.
A sourdough starter is a living culture of yeasts and lactic-acid bacteria. It is constantly changing in response to temperature, flour, feeding, time and the conditions in your kitchen. That means your starter may develop differently from someone else’s, even when you are both following exactly the same recipe.
Perhaps that is the first thing worth learning about sourdough: there is not always one perfect answer.
What matters most, then, is not experience but attention. Learn to notice small changes. Watch how your starter rises and falls again, pay attention to its smell and texture, and try to understand what the dough is telling you. As you go, you will find yourself relying less on a schedule and becoming more confident in what you can actually see in front of you.v
What do you actually need?
Not much.
A good starter does not begin with a perfectly equipped kitchen. You need flour and water, a clean glass jar, a kitchen scale and something to cover the jar loosely. After that, what matters most is time, attention and a little patience.
That does not mean all those beautiful baking tools have no value. A good banneton, dough scraper, lame or Dutch oven can make baking more enjoyable and certain techniques easier. But you do not need to own them all before you make your first starter.
In fact, it is often more enjoyable to discover how you like to bake first, and only then decide which tools genuinely suit you.
You do not need a special sourdough machine, a professional oven or a cupboard full of baking equipment.
Simply start.
A starter is not a recipe
This may be one of the most important things to understand before you begin.
A starter is not something you make once and then simply take out of the fridge whenever you want to bake bread. You are building a living culture and then learning how to care for it. You feed it flour and water, watch how it responds and, over time, learn to recognise when it is active, when it reaches its peak and when it simply needs more time.
At first, that can feel rather mysterious.
A few days later, you may suddenly start noticing the small signals. The bubbles along the side of the jar. The change in texture. The way the smell develops as fermentation progresses. The moment when your starter clearly becomes stronger and more active.
And somewhere along the way, something changes.
Feeding your starter no longer feels like a step from a recipe, but like a small part of your kitchen rhythm. You begin to know roughly what you want to see and understand more clearly why one day can behave so differently from the next.
A recipe is a starting point
With sourdough, you will soon discover that there is a ratio, schedule or established method for almost everything. A certain amount of starter, a particular hydration, a certain number of folds and a set amount of time for bulk fermentation.
Those recipes are valuable. They give you something to work from and make it much easier to understand what you are doing when you are just starting out.
But they are not laws.
A recipe is a starting point.
You may use a little more or a little less flour in your starter. You may let your bulk fermentation run longer or shorter because your dough is behaving differently from what you expected. You may discover that a particular way of shaping works better for your dough, or that an open bake in your oven works just as well — or even better — than the Dutch oven used in the recipe.
That does not mean ratios and techniques do not matter. They influence the result, and some choices simply require more experience. But sourdough is not an exact formula in which one small deviation automatically means your bread has failed.
Flour, temperature, starter, dough, oven and time are constantly working together.
Learn why a recipe works first. Then you have the freedom to move beyond it.
Perhaps that bread will eventually become one of your favourites.
Do not be afraid of the first few days
The first few days can be confusing, especially when you see so many starters online that neatly double in size and seem to do exactly what their makers expect.
A young starter may look remarkably active at first and then almost stop. Its smell may change. You may see lots of bubbles, or hardly any visible activity for a while. Sometimes everything seems to happen quickly, and sometimes it feels as though nothing is happening at all.
That does not automatically mean something is wrong.
The development of a starter is a changing process, influenced by temperature, flour, moisture and the conditions in which you care for it. That is why a schedule is best treated as a guide rather than a promise that your starter will behave on day three, five or seven exactly like someone else’s.
Use the days to give you direction.
But above all, look at what is actually happening in your jar.
Learn to notice what is happening
Sourdough becomes much less mysterious once you learn what to look for.
Instead of asking only:
“What day am I on?”
you can increasingly ask yourself:
“What is my starter doing?”
Is it becoming more active? Does it rise after feeding? How long does it take to reach its peak? Is the texture changing? What does it smell like? Are you beginning to see a similar pattern across several feedings?
These are the signals you eventually learn to work with.
You do not have to recognise them all immediately. The first few days are a good opportunity simply to watch and discover. An elastic band around the jar can help you mark the starting level, so you can see how much your starter has actually risen. A few simple observations can sometimes tell you more than a schedule filled with fixed times.
Slowly, a kind of language develops between you and your starter.
Not because the starter is literally telling you anything, but because you are learning to recognise what is happening.
Give it time
One of the hardest things about sourdough may also be one of the most beautiful: you cannot speed everything up.
Fermentation takes time. Your starter needs time to develop. Even a dough that eventually becomes a beautiful loaf has its own pace. Temperature and ingredients play a part, but time remains an essential part of the process.
Some days, almost nothing seems to happen. On others, your starter may suddenly grow much faster than you expected.
That is sourdough.
It teaches you to work not only with a recipe, but with a process. You begin to look at what is happening in front of you rather than only at the clock. And perhaps that is one of the reasons sourdough becomes more than simply a way of baking bread for so many people.
You make something, give it your attention and then allow it to do its own work.
And then there is discard
At some point, you will come across the word discard. It refers to the portion of your starter that is removed during a feeding.
That may sound as though it is simply meant to be thrown away, but discard can actually be quite useful. You can use it in pancakes, crackers and other bakes where the flavour and qualities of fermented flour can really shine.
There is one practical habit worth learning from the beginning, though: do not pour starter or discard down the sink. Flour can build up inside pipes and cause problems over time. Put it in your household waste, or keep it if you plan to use it later.
You do not need to know yet exactly what you are going to do with all that discard. That will come naturally once your starter has become part of your kitchen.
Your starter does not have to be perfect
There is a particular kind of sourdough pressure that comes from what we see online.
Tall, perfectly shaped loaves. A spectacular open crumb. Beautiful scores that have opened exactly when they were supposed to. Starters that double predictably every single day.
The real baking process is usually a little less tidy.
Your first loaf may be flatter than you hoped. The crumb may be denser than the photograph you saved. Your starter may take longer to become reliably active. Perhaps your scoring does not turn out the way you wanted, or your dough is much softer than you expected.
That does not mean you have done something wrong.
It means you are learning.
And sometimes it is precisely by doing something differently that you discover a recipe is not the only possible answer. A bulk fermentation that runs a little shorter or longer, a different way of shaping, or an open bake instead of a Dutch oven can produce a loaf that turns out surprisingly well.
Not every deviation is a mistake.
Sometimes it is simply another route to the same destination.
Every loaf shows you something the previous one could not. Sometimes that is exactly what you need to try something differently next time.
The beautiful photographs can wait.
Where do you go from here?
You do not have to learn everything at once. The Sourdough Journal is therefore not intended to be one long guide that you have to work through from beginning to end. Think of it instead as a collection of places you can return to whenever you want to understand something a little better.
The Sourdough Roadmap
Want to understand how everything fits together first? Start with the Sourdough Roadmap.
Here, we take you through the questions almost every beginner has: why sourdough is so fascinating, what fermentation actually means, what to expect when you begin and how to work your way calmly towards your first loaf.
The Living Starter
Ready to make your own starter? This is your next step.
Here, we look at making and feeding your culture, recognising activity, understanding its rhythm and storing or reviving a starter when things do not quite go according to plan.
From Dough to Bread
Once your starter is ready to bake with, the next chapter begins.
From flour and water to dough, fermentation, shaping, proofing and baking, this is where you discover how a starter eventually becomes a loaf that can make its way to the table.
A quieter way of making bread
You can approach sourdough as a recipe that you try to follow as precisely as possible. Or you can approach it as a craft in which you slowly learn to look, feel and understand.
Perhaps you follow a basic recipe almost exactly for your first few loaves. That gives you something to rely on and helps you become familiar with the process. But over time, you discover that not every step has to unfold in exactly the same way. A slightly longer bulk fermentation, a little more water, a different way of shaping or an open bake instead of a Dutch oven can all be part of the same process.
You gradually learn to pay attention to what your dough and starter are telling you rather than only watching the clock.
Perhaps that is where the real pleasure begins. Not when you can follow a recipe perfectly, but when you understand why it works and, because of that, gain the freedom to find your own way.
Not perfection. Not speed.
Just the quiet satisfaction of learning how something works, giving it your attention and, little by little, making it your own.
Every loaf begins somewhere.
Yours can begin here.
“Once you have mastered a technique, you hardly need look at a recipe again and can take off on your own.”
— Julia Child