How to Bake Sourdough with ZERO Waste

So if you're like me, you sometimes go days, weeks, or even months without baking sourdough bread, but you still want to maintain your starter for the times you need it. Unfortunately, that maintenance typically means using up a ton of flour, most of which ends up getting wasted, not to mention a ton of time. I mean, this feeding basically just becomes another chore on your never-ending to-do list. Recently though, I've actually started using a method that only requires about 5 minutes of active time per month, and when done right, it completely eliminates the need for discards. Now it's nothing groundbreaking, I mean I'm sure there are plenty of others using similar methods, but for some reason I just never thought to do it this way until recently, and I imagine that you might be the same way, so I figured I'd share. And there are basically two main things that make this method work. Number one is the fact that a sourdough starter can actually last a lot longer in the fridge than most people think. And number two is that you really don't need to feed your starter with a lot of flour and water in order to keep it alive. So we're probably all familiar with the concept of keeping your starter in the fridge. It significantly slows down the activity of the starter and preserves it so that you don't need to feed it nearly as frequently. Certainly not every day, but even until recently, I was still aiming to feed my starter about once per week. That is, until I got busy and forgot about it. Things came up, I wasn't really baking a lot of sourdough, and the poor little guy just got pushed to the back of the fridge, buried behind a bunch of other more important items. So one week in the fridge soon became two, and then three, until eventually more than a month had gone by, and still no feeding. But to my surprise, when I finally took the starter out, it was perfectly fine. It still had its delicious, fruity smell, and when I fed it, it rose beautifully as if it had never missed a day. So after some more research, I found that a starter can safely last in the fridge for at least two months without any feeding. Which, I don't know about you, but I was pretty surprised to find out. Maybe I was overly paranoid about killing my starter, or maybe I just never thought to question the original method I learned. But either way, I always thought that feeding every single week was the way it needed to be done. Now for me, I still like to play it safe, so I'm currently only going about one month between feedings. And that's what I recommend you do, because everyone's fridge temperature is slightly different, and there are a lot of factors that can play into it. So I would say one month is just a safer and more broadly applicable recommendation. But it definitely beats a week, and doing that alone makes a huge difference in saving yourself time and flour. But even so, that's only the first piece of the puzzle. You see, I had also been previously feeding my starter with pretty large amounts of flour and water, usually about 50 grams of each. Or about this much. Just because again, that's what I thought was necessary to keep it alive. But I recently saw some buzz about a so-called scrapings method, I think it was made popular by Bake with Jack, where he would keep his starter in the fridge with just a few scrapings on the side of the jar. For me though, that is a bit extreme, because it can lead to your starter drying out if you're not careful. But it did get me thinking. So every time I would feed my starter, I would discard all but about 10 grams. And then I would feed with 20 grams of flour and water, or about this much. And sure enough, it worked out just fine. So after dialing it in for the last few months, here's my method. Once per month, usually on a Saturday or a Sunday, I'll take my starter out of the fridge in the morning, and then let it warm up to room temperature and rise a bit. Number one, to make sure it's still healthy, but also to get some activity going so that it'll rise a bit better when I feed it. And sometimes there's some liquid that's formed at the top, but that's perfectly normal. You can just stir it in before feeding. So after about two to three hours, I'll discard all but about 10 grams, and then feed with 20 grams each of flour and water. Then I'll let the starter rise again, preferably for about six to eight hours, until it's almost reached its peak rise. And that's just because we want the starter to be as healthy and active as possible when we cool it down, in order to preserve all of that good activity. Then I'll just throw it into the fridge for another month, or at least until the next time I'm ready to bake. So all of a sudden, I went from feeding 50 grams of flour and water each week to 20 grams each month, which is a reduction of over 10 times. But that's not even the best part. The best part is that if you bake at least once per month, you can completely eliminate the need for any discard, which is why I say this is a zero-waste method. So for example, let's say you bake bread on the second of each month. The day before that, which would be the first of the month, you can take your starter out of the fridge and use this feeding method I just described. But when you go to discard, rather than actually getting rid of that extra 40 grams of starter, just pour it into a separate jar. And that'll actually become the leaven for the bread you're gonna make tomorrow. So say you need a 100 gram leaven, just add 30 grams of flour and 30 grams of water to that 40 grams of starter, and by the next morning, it'll be perfectly risen, ready to use in your bread that day. Then of course, with the mother starter, just feed the usual 20 grams each of flour and water, and you can forget about that for another month. And if you bake more than once a month, even better. Anytime you bake, just take the starter out a day before, use your approximately 40 grams of discard to make your leaven, and then feed the starter as usual and return it to the fridge. So I'm usually not a perfectionist when it comes to sourdough bread, because you really don't need to be. Instead, I tend to prioritize efficiency and convenience over things like using precise ratios and timings. There are way too many unpredictable factors that can throw those things off, so your time is much better spent practicing your technique and developing a better understanding of the bread making process. Which is exactly what I showed you how to do in this video, so you can click right here to watch that one next. It'll help you to develop a bread baking intuition so that you can rely on your own senses while baking rather than precise measurements and ratios. So thanks a lot for watching, and I'll see you over there.