Cookbook FAQ

Three things have to be true at once, not one of them. It doubles within four to six hours of a feed; a spoonful floats in room-temperature water; and it smells tangy — yogurt, ripe fruit, beer — rather than like acetone.

One out of three is a starter that is still coming up. Some float by day seven, some take until day ten or twelve, and a cold kitchen is usually the reason for the difference.

Equal weights of starter, flour and water — twenty grams of each, fifty of each, whatever size you keep. That is a 1:1:1 feed at 100% hydration, and it is the ratio every recipe on this site is written against. When a recipe says 100 g active starter, it means 100 g of a 1:1:1 starter at peak.

Yes, weigh it. A cup of flour can vary by a third depending on how it was scooped, and sourdough is unforgiving about that in a way most baking is not. A scale is the cheapest piece of equipment here and the one that changes the most.

Whole wheat carries more of the wild yeast, nutrients and minerals fermentation needs, because the bran and germ are still in it. It is the most reliable thing to both start and maintain a starter on.

Organic matters more than the brand — the flour touches the starter's yeast every single day. King Arthur Organic Unbleached Whole Wheat is what this site's starter is fed on; Bob's Red Mill and Central Milling organic whole wheat work well too.

Avoid self-rising and cake flour and anything with added leaveners: those don't just fail to help, they work against you.

Yes, and most home bakers should. Feed it once a week, lid on but not airtight.

To bake from it: take it out the night before, feed it 1:1:1, leave it on the counter, and wait for peak — usually eight to twelve hours. Counter storage with a feed every twelve to twenty-four hours is for people baking more than twice a week.

The ratio never changes between the two. Only the schedule does.

Almost certainly not. Gray or clear liquid is hooch, and it means the starter is hungry. Stir it back in and feed on schedule, or feed more often.

The one thing that is not recoverable is pink, orange or fuzzy spots. That is mold, and the starter goes in the bin — it is rare, and it is not worth the risk of deciding otherwise.

Don't bin it automatically. Discard has flavor and can leaven some things even when it is too sluggish to raise a boule.

Three recipes here are built for it specifically — sourdough pancakes, banana bread and pumpkin bread — and they use discard the way other recipes use eggs or milk, as an ingredient rather than a leavener. Keep a jar in the fridge, add to it at every feed, and bake it off when it fills.

The Classic boule. It is the master dough for this site and every other loaf branches from it, so the hours you spend learning it are not spent once — they transfer to everything else here.

Get comfortable with it before you go looking for the interesting ones.

Flour is always 100%, and every other ingredient is expressed as a percentage of the flour weight. Water at 75% of a 500 g flour weight is 375 g.

It sounds like a formality until you want to scale a recipe, compare two of them, or work out why one dough is slack and another is stiff — then it is the only sane way to talk about bread. The calculator on this site converts between grams and percentages so you can think in whichever direction suits you.

Temperature is the variable most home bakers ignore and it moves fermentation more than almost anything else. A dough that would bulk in four hours at 78°F can sit sullen all afternoon at 65°F.

If your oven has a proof setting, that is what it is for — the oven-proof guide on this site walks through using it, and the fallback of an oven light in a closed oven when you don't have one. Warm spots on top of the fridge and near a running appliance also work.

The Classic goes in at 500°F and comes down to 450°F. The initial heat drives oven spring — the last burst of expansion before the crust sets — and the drop lets the inside finish without the outside going too dark.

Starting at the lower temperature the whole way costs you height. Staying at the higher one costs you the crust.

The Classic is about twenty hours total and about thirty minutes of that is active. That gap is the honest answer to most sourdough questions: it is a slow process you visit occasionally, not a long job you stand over.

Most of those hours are the dough fermenting while you do something else, which is why the baking schedule page maps them onto a real day rather than listing them as a duration.

Four, unless the recipe says otherwise. The scaler on each dinner adjusts the ingredient quantities if you are cooking for a different number.

Yes — the dinner planner builds one from whichever dinners you pick, and it comes out sorted by aisle rather than by recipe. That is the difference between a list you read once at home and a list you can actually shop from without doubling back.

Note that the shopping list page is a different thing: that one is the sourdough kit as a checklist, not a grocery list.

That depends on your store, your region and the week, which is why the cost tool ships no prices at all. You put in what things cost where you actually shop, and it works out cost per serving from there.

Prices are remembered by ingredient rather than by dinner, so pricing olive oil once carries it across every recipe that uses it — the tool gets faster the more you use it. Nothing you enter leaves your browser.

Yes. Every dinner carries diet and high-protein flags, and both the cookbook index and the planner filter on them.

Yes. Every recipe page has a scaler, and because the sourdough recipes are written in baker's percentage the ratios hold at any size.

Two things do not scale linearly and are worth watching: bake time moves less than you expect (a half-size loaf is not half the time), and a bigger dough ferments slightly faster because it holds its own heat.

Because they make recipes worse to use. The site is free, the recipe is at the top of its own page, and the tools work without a sign-up.

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