How to make Gluten Free Sourdough Starter

In order to make anything sourdough, you first need a sourdough starter. A starter is a simple mixture of flour and water that captures wild yeasts and beneficial bacteria, creating the natural fermentation that gives sourdough its tangy flavor and gentle rise. Once active, it can be added to gluten-free breads, pancakes, biscuits, flatbreads, and more, bringing both flavor and some of the nutritional benefits of fermentation.

The basic process is simple: mix flour and water in a clean jar, then let it rest on your countertop in a warm spot out of direct sunlight. Each day, discard about half of the starter and feed what remains with fresh flour and water. After a few days, you should begin to see bubbles, and after about a week, your starter should be active enough to use in your first gluten-free sourdough recipes.

A healthy rice-based gluten-free sourdough starter

Feeding your starter

As long as you keep a sourdough starter, you need to keep feeding it. Feeding simply means giving the wild yeasts and bacteria fresh flour and water so they have something new to eat. A healthy starter will keep bubbling, rising, and developing flavor as long as it is fed regularly.

The more starter you keep, the more flour it will need. This is why most sourdough instructions tell you to discard part of the starter before each feeding. Discarding keeps the amount manageable, so you are not feeding a larger and larger jar of starter every day (and thus using more and more flour). You can throw the discard away, or add it to baked goods like pancakes, flatbread or biscuits. These "discard" recipes are not fermented, but they reduce wasted flour.

For a gluten-free starter, the flour you choose matters. Most whole grain gluten-free flours can be used, but they each behave a little differently. Some have a stronger flavor, or different texture or color. I have personally tried brown rice flour, white rice flour, sorghum flour, teff flour, and buckwheat flour, and each one has its own personality.

Below are my notes on the flours I have used, what I liked about them, and where they worked best in a gluten-free sourdough starter.

Brown Rice Flour

Brown rice flour is a staple in my gluten-free baking. It gives the starter yeasts and bacteria enough nutrition to stay active, but it is still mild and easy to bake with. I think of it as a good baseline flour for a gluten-free starter.

White Rice Flour

White rice flour is milder and starchier than brown rice flour. I have mostly used it when I wanted a lighter-colored starter for recipes like sourdough Christmas cookies. It is pale and slightly gummy, and in my experience, it does not seem to rise quite as quickly as some whole grain flours.

Buckwheat Flour

Buckwheat flour is traditionally used in fermented foods, but I found that it behaved oddly in my starter. It gave the mixture a stretchy texture and a pinkish cast. The texture was not a problem, but the color looked uncomfortably close to bad bacterial growth, so I stopped using buckwheat in my starter.

Sorghum Flour

Sorghum flour is one of my go-to options for feeding a gluten-free starter. It is a solid whole grain flour that keeps the starter active without adding an overpowering flavor. One of my favorite starter combinations is a 50/50 split of sorghum flour and teff flour.

Teff Flour

Teff flour is a standout in terms of nutrition, and it is one of my favorite flours to use in both starter and baking. It is a dark flour, so it will give your starter a brown tint. That works beautifully in bread, though I have been less pleased with it in lighter recipes like cookies or biscuits, where I want a softer flavor and color.

One small oddity with teff: when a teff based starter gets hungry, it burbles out black or dark grey liquid. This looks very disconcerting, but don't worry! Its not any strange growth, just the tint from the flour.

For more information on the various gluten free flours, check out my flour and baking guides.

Gluten-free sourdough buns

Gluten-free sourdough "discard" pancakes

Gluten-free sourdough "discard" biscuits

Adapting your gluten-free sourdough starter

Just because you start with one flour, or one combination of flours, does not mean you have to use it forever. Sourdough starter is flexible, and it will gradually adjust to whatever you feed it.

For instance, you might begin with a sorghum and brown rice flour combination, then later decide that teff or white rice flour works better for the recipes you want to make. Or you may want a darker, heartier starter for bread and a lighter starter for cookies or holiday baking. Adapting your starter is simple: just begin feeding it with the new flour.

Over the course of a few days of feeding and discarding, the starter will begin to take on the character of its new flour base. I have changed my starter from rice-based, to sorghum-based, to teff-based. I have also taken part of an active starter and used it to create a separate white rice starter for holiday baking. The only real caveat is that the starter needs a few days to adjust, so plan ahead if you want to use it in a specific recipe.

Complications and mold: when sourdough starter goes bad

So, what happens if you forget to feed your starter?

Terrible, awful things. Enter: mold and bad bacteria.

Forgetting to feed your starter for one day is usually not a big deal. It may separate a bit, develop a layer of liquid on top, or bubble sullenly at you from the jar. Just stir it back together, discard a portion, feed it again, and it should recover.

The bigger problems begin when a starter is neglected for several days, especially while it is still young. When a starter is healthy and well fed, the good yeasts and bacteria help keep the mixture acidic and active. When those microbes are underfed and weak, unwanted growth has a much better chance of taking over. An older, established starter may give you more room for error, but any starter with visible mold, fuzzy growth, pink or orange streaks, or a truly rotten smell should be thrown away. The smell is an especially good indicator of the health of your starter. If it stops smelling like food, and starts smelling foul, toss it.

What kind of mold or bacterial growth appears will depend on your kitchen environment. I once lost two starters to a pinkish growth that smelled vaguely like bad cheese. The first time, my starter was a few months old and I had no backup in the fridge, so I had to throw the whole thing out and start again.

The wisdom of the internet suggested that I may have been dealing with serratia marcescens, a pink-colored bacteria that likes damp environments. Since that same bacteria is often found in the dark corners of bathrooms, I decided not to play games with it. Its best to be safe in anything involving fermentation - when in doubt, throw it out.

Frozen sourdough starter disks - a great way to ensure you will never loose your aged starter

How to protect your starter

Sourdough starter takes a week to be ready to bake with, but many weeks (if not months or years) to achieve the best flavor and rise. You'll see bakeries bragging about how they have twenty year old starters - or older! In general, the older the starter, the better it is. So while you can always start over, the goal is to keep your starter healthy and happy for the long haul.

Healthy sourdough practices

Your starter will grow and mature the fastest at room temperature, or slightly above. That means leaving it on the counter (or unheated oven) and feeding it every day - if not twice a day. But while this is the best way to get your starter into top form, it is also where your starter has the most chance to go bad. So to protect your starter, make sure to always use distilled water. You don't want to introduce new bacteria into your starter that the good yeasts aren't prepared to fight. Nor do you want to kill your yeasts with chlorine from the tap. Distilled water is pure and unproblematic.

In addition, make sure to clean your container at least once a week. Bits of extra flour and starter inevitably end up smeared all the way to the rim of any container, no matter how well you scrape it down every feeding. Those bits of flour are separated from the main body of the yeasts, and so more vulnerable to mold. Moving your starter into a new clean and sterilized container keeps everything healthy.

As you can see, starter maintenance takes regular care. But life happens. Vacations happen. It is not always feasible (or economical) to keep your starter fed for months on end of maximal growth. Fortunately, yeasts go dormant when exposed to cold. The refrigerator and freezer are your best friends in preserving your starter.

Preserving your starter in the refrigerator

Once your starter is old enough to use - so at least a week old - you can put it in the fridge at any time. This will slow down its growth, meaning you only have to feed it once a week (if that, I've left mine for as long as two weeks and still been able to wake it). This keeps it from going bad just because life got in the way of feeding it for a few days.

The only disadvantage of using the refrigerator to preserve your starter is that you will need to "wake it up" every time you want to bake. This means taking the starter out, putting it in a warm place, and feeding it to get the fermentation started again. After a few hours (~4ish, depending on how warm it is), your starter will be active and rising again, though you may need to wait longer for it to rise and be in peak baking condition.

Essentially, you will need to plan ahead every time you want to bake with starter from the fridge. But that is often a reasonable price to pay for keeping your unique colony of wild yeasts healthy.

Gluten free sourdough loaf - the goal of starter care

Preserving your starter in the freezer

Once you have a starter you are happy with, consider freezing a little as a backup. The freezer is one of the easiest ways to preserve sourdough starter long-term, since the cold slows the yeasts and bacteria down so much that they can rest there for months, or even longer.

To freeze your starter, portion it out first instead of freezing one large blob. I like using a silicon disk mold for this because the starter freezes into neat little portions that are easy to pop out and store. Once the disks are fully frozen, move them into a labeled freezer bag or reusable silicone bag so you know exactly what they are and when you froze them.

To revive frozen starter, take out 1-2 disks and let them thaw in a clean glass jar. Once thawed, feed the starter the same way you would feed a fresh starter. After about three days of regular feeding, it should be bubbly, active, and ready to use again.

Your starter is just the beginning

Once your gluten-free sourdough starter is active, it becomes a little kitchen companion you can keep feeding, adapting, and using in all kinds of baking. It may seem mysterious at first, but the process is simple: flour, water, time, and a little regular care.

With a good jar, a few reliable gluten-free flours, and a simple feeding routine, you can keep your starter healthy for breads, flatbreads, biscuits, pancakes, and more. Below, I’ve gathered a few helpful supplies for making and storing your starter, followed by answers to some common gluten-free sourdough questions.