Sarah Owens Sourdough is a cooking book, preferably for baking fermented bread, savories, sweets, and many more. Sarah spent years baking classic baked bread, only to start realizing that she had formed a severe inability to consume or even tolerate the ingredients used in conventional toasted bread. It led her to find a healthy alternative.
Sarah began experimenting with sourdough leavening flour that almost automatically started to heal her digestive system. It gave her inspiration in the kitchen until she published Sourdough, a cookbook that compiled a list of recipes in making fermented bread. She was a James Beard Award Winner for her Sourdough book.
In Sarah Owens Sourdough book, she elaborated on how to start a sourdough using yeast water. Below is the recipe Sarah Owens Sourdough Starter you can follow.
Methods for Making:
- Put 60 grams of flour and six tablespoons of water in a small bowl. Stir together until no lumps. Loosely wrap it with a clean towel and put it in a warm room for two until three days. Remove half of the mixture; add another 60 grams of flour, and six tablespoons of water. Ferment it for eight up to 12 hours at room temp.
- Remove half of the mixture again. Add 90-gram flour and one tablespoon of water. Ferment it again for 8-12 hours. Once it produces yeasted and creamy scent, have a float test by dropping the sourdough starter in a cup of water. If it’s floating, the yeast is sufficiently active to produce CO2 gas as a result of fermentation.
- After that, feed the sourdough starter with flour and water with a ratio 1:1:1. It will produce a starter that is suitable for the recipes in the Sourdough book. Feed it daily if you keep it at room temp. Feed it weekly if you store it in the refrigerator.
- To prevent the starter from drying out, store it in a jar with a loose lid. It would be best if you store it in a mason jar with flip upper lid as you can remove the rubber strap to allow the cover to be wholly closed yet still loose.
Remember that making a sourdough starter in the winter will be much slower than in the warmer season. If, after one week, you don’t smell anything, place a heating pad with the lowest temperature under your jar, or in any other places in your house that is warmer than the room temp at your kitchen. Your starter based on Sarah Owens Sourdough cookbook will succeed if you thoroughly follow every step above.
