Sourdough Banana Bread (Starter Discard Recipe) - Umami Girl (2024)

FAQs

How much of your sourdough starter should you discard? ›

Experts recommend feeding a starter twice daily. And at each feeding, you hold onto 1/2 cup of your original starter, discard the rest, and then add its same weight in water and flour. With this schedule, you'd discard almost a cup of sourdough starter every day.

Over the years, I've found keeping the mixture warm at around 80°F (26°C), and high hydration (100% water to flour in baker's percentages) helps get things started. In addition, while not mandatory, using certain flour also helps increase the chances a starter will take hold quickly (see below).

The starter is a mixture of flour and water that captures wild yeast and bacteria over time, creating a leavening agent for bread. What is this? On the other hand, sourdough discard refers to the portion of the starter that is removed and discarded before feeding the remaining starter during regular maintenance.

Typical signs of food spoilage and mold include pink, orange, or green colors, white fuzzy spots, or sometimes areas that are darker with white areas on top. If you see any of these signs, I would recommend throwing your starter away and creating a new one.

I recommend keeping sourdough discard for up to one week.

If needed, mark the date on the container in your refrigerator. After one week, there is a higher chance of the discard growing bad bacteria or mold.

You can use old sourdough discard if it's been stored in the fridge, however, you really want to use it up within a week - 2 weeks max.

While the age of your starter won't make your bread any better — turns out, only good sourdough practices can do that — it's a link in the long legacy of sourdough, one of the oldest forms of baking that exists. Whether your starter is a week or a decade old, you can become part of that lineage as well.

Place the jar at room temperature for 24 hours, until you begin to see the mixture bubbling up. It is important that you stir the sourdough starter every day in the morning and in the evening.

By creating a sourdough starter, you are nurturing a colony of bacteria. Those bacteria have an ideal temperature to thrive in – that's between 20 and 24 Centrigrade, 70 and 75 Farenheit. The closer you can keep your sourdough starter to this temperature, the quicker and easier building it up will be.

It can be at room temperature or come directly from the fridge. The texture is less bubbly (if bubbly at all) when compared to fluffy active starter. Sourdough discard is not active enough to make bread dough rise, and despite its name the “discard” does not have to be thrown away.

How do I know if my sourdough discard is ready to use? ›

A jar of sourdough discard serves as an insurance policy against starter death. If you have some discard on hand, remove a spoonful of it and feed it fresh flour and water in a clean jar. You should have a bubbly starter ready to bake with after a couple of feedings, depending on the discard's condition.

Yes, you can give your friend a portion of sourdough discard to start their own sourdough starter, however it's best if your starter is mature (at least 3 months old) when you do this, so that your friend can start baking straight away.

Things that Will Kill A Sourdough Starter

High Temperatures - preheating your oven with your sourdough starter inside can lead to your starter's demise - but it would have to be completely baked for it to be completely unresponsive to some TLC.

If you think you killed your starter with heat, always use a probe thermometer to take the temperature in the center of the starter. If it is below 130F/54C it is still alive, even if it was exposed to a higher oven temperature for a short time.

Yeast will die if exposed to temps of 60C or above (140F). It is very likely that your sourdough starter will actually die at temps lower than this. Anything above 120F (50C) would be considered too hot for a sourdough starter and will kill the wild yeast if exposed for long periods.

As you can see (or smell!), a sourdough starter should have a sour, tangy, and yeasty aroma, with subtle undertones depending on the type of flour used. However, offensive or foul odours such as rancid, putrid, or mouldy smells are signs that something has gone wrong with the starter.

If you don't discard your sourdough starter, it will grow too big and be unmanageable. Not to mention you will go through an unmentionable amount of flour.

All you need to do is take 20g of the starter you already have and then feed it with 20g of flour and 20g of water (so 1:1:1). Then you'll have a 60g starter, which is considered a smaller amount. You can of course reduce these amounts even further if you wish, but this is a reasonable size to keep waste to a minimum.

But if there's a lot of liquid (say, more than half an inch or so), and especially if it's very dark, feel free to pour it off: not because it's “bad,” but because that amount of liquid may change your starter's hydration enough to make a difference in your baking.