For years, I thought that sourdough bread was out of reach on a gluten free diet. That classic recipe of just flour, water, and salt to make bread requires wheat flour, after all. Will the wild yeasts still come to give the bread rise if the bread is made of gluten free flour? Can you ferment gluten free dough when it has so many extra ingredients, like flaxseed and psyllium husk, and eggs? Surely such deliciousness as sourdough is out of reach if you cannot have wheat...
Not true. Sourdough starter can be made from many different types of flour, including gluten free ones, such as brown rice flour, sorghum, and buckwheat. Yes, you can have gluten free sourdough! You just have to make your own gluten free sourdough starter.
In order to make anything sourdough, you need sourdough starter. The starter is a flour, water, and yeast mixture, that you can then add to almost any baked good. It adds a sour tang to your breads, pancakes, or biscuits. Additionally, the yeast in the sourdough makes the nutrients in the flour more digestible, making fermented sourdough baked goods more nutritious.
Making the starter is easy - put an equal amount of flour and water in a jar on your countertop, out of direct light. Every day, discard half of the starter, and replace it with equal parts flour and water. After a few days, the starter should start bubbling. After a week, it is ready to use.
As long as you have your starter, you need to keep feeding it. That means adding equal parts flour and water every day. The more starter you have, the faster it will eat through that new flour, and so the more flour you will need to add to keep it happy. The solution to the ever increasing appetite of sourdough starter is to use it, or discard it. More on that below.
You can use any gluten free flour you like in your sourdough starter, though wholemeal ones will probably work the best. I personally use brown rice flour, and sorghum. I have also used just brown rice flour, and it worked quite well. Millet flour and buckwheat are also good options.
What happens if you don't feed your starter?
Terrible, awful things.
Forgetting to feed your starter for one day is not a big deal. The water will separate from the flour, and it will bubble sullenly at you. Just stir it, and feed it again, and the starter will be fine.
But if you leave it for multiple days, you put your sourdough starter at danger for mold growth. When the starter is healthy and well fed, the "good" yeasts in the starter are able to keep the bad bacteria at bay. When they are hungry and weak, harmful bacteria can multiply, and leave you with an inedible sludge. Sourdough starter gets stronger with age, so you may have more room for error if you have an older starter.
What mold or other nastiness you get will depend upon your environment. For me, I had two starters ruined by a pink "mold" that smelled vaguely like bad cheese. The first time, my starter was a few months old, and I had no backup in the fridge. I had to throw the whole thing out. The wisdom of the internet suggested that what I encountered was serratia marcescens, a pink-colored bacteria which loves moisture, and can cause various infections in humans. Some people say that they have salvaged starters from serratia marcescens, but given that this bacteria is one that often haunts the dark corners of bathrooms, I opted to start over. Best to be safe.
Once your starter is old enough to use - so at least a week old - then you can put it in the fridge. This will slow down its growth, meaning that you only have to feed it once a week. This keeps it from going bad just because life got in the way of feeding it for a few days.
Now I do not keep my starter in the fridge, despite my previous mishaps. The reason is that I want it to grow and mature as fast as possible to fuel my baking. An older starter makes more delicious baked goods.
But I do keep all the sourdough discard in the fridge. This lets me dip into it whenever I have extra baking to do, and as long as I use the discard in a week, it is on hand as a "backup starter" should my primary starter suffer a mishap. That extra bowl of discard saved me from starting again from scratch on my second run-in with serratia marcescens.
If you need to be gone for an extended period of time, sourdough starter will be fine in the refrigerator for a week or so. I have left it as long as two weeks in the fridge with no harm done. But after a couple of weeks, it will need to be fed.
For even longer periods of time, you can store some starter in the freezer. It will keep there safe and sound for about a year.
In both cases, you will need to give the starter some time to "wake up" once you take it out of its place of cool storage.
Put your sourdough starter in a silicon mold to create little sourdough disks and freeze for later!
A 100% hydration sourdough starter made with brown rice and sorghum flour.
Brown Rice Flour
Sorghum Flour
Distilled Water
Day 1: Add the following to a clean sterilized vessel, like a quart mason jar:
Day 2: Throw away (discard) half of your flour-water mixture, and feed with:
Mix the new flour in with the old starter, using a silicon or wooden spoon. Then replace the lid, and return the jar to its warm shadey spot.
Days 3-7: Repeat the steps from Day 2. Around Day 3 or 4, you should start to see bubbles in the starter. By Day 7, it should be rising in between feedings.
Day 7+: After a full week, you can start using your starter and discard. Instead of throwing half of the starter away every day, you can store it in the refrigerator for baking later. If you want more starter, you can always start feeding it a more generous amount every day.
For instance, I bake sourdough bread about every other day, in addition to other sourdough goodies, so my feeding amounts currently are: