You love sourdough bread and want to make it at home? But how do you get hold of this magical sourdough starter that you need? You will likely have 3 options to acquire a sourdough starter.
- Find a friend of family member who can give you some
- Make your own
- Buy a sourdough starter
There are a couple of questions to ask yourself as you make this decision. Do you want to or have the time to wait for you sourdough starter to start up? Making your own sourdough starter is not a quick process so you could buy sourdough starter to start baking quickly.
Do you want a high quality, high wild yeast content and balanced lactic acid profile, starter? Buying sourdough starter or getting some from a friends and family will likely mean you have a higher quality fast start. There are many things to consider and this blog will help you make the decision of whether you wish to try your hand at making your own starter or buy it instead.
Why Buying Sourdough Starter is Faster Than Waiting to Start Your Own
Sourdough starter takes some effort but importantly time to create on your own. So, you must decide whether you have to patience to create one from scratch. What can be even more frustrating about creating your own starter is that it can fail at any time. So, after working at it for the days/weeks it takes to mature, it could completely fail and put you back at the beginning.
You may want to start making your sourdough starter at a certain time of year to have the best conditions for your starter. You could wait for the ideal environment to start, or you could jumpstart the process and buy a sourdough starter or find a friend or family member who has one.
Creating a sourdough starter can be wasteful, as you tend to get through quite a bit of flour. You have to continually feed your starter and this can be for a couple of weeks before you are ready to use it. It can more cost effective to buy sourdough starter but you may choose to create your own because there is definitely satisfaction in doing it yourself.
Achieve Better Flavour
A developed sourdough has better flavour than a freshly started one. There isn't much more flavour to gain after a couple of months of regular feeding. By buying sourdough starter you can bypass the wait and get a better-tasting bread right away.
Stronger Starter
Creating your own starter can be an intensive and time-consuming process and many people absolutely love doing so. There are some of us that may not have enough time or patience to feed our starter daily but want delicious home-baked bread.
One of the key benefits of a well-fed starter is that sourdough starters that are fed daily have higher yeast level. This means that your sourdough bread will ferment and proof faster and it will have a more consistent and reliable bake. All our sourdough starters at GetSourdough are fed daily, so if you want to get baking quickly with a strong and developed starter, it might be the right option for you.
You Don’t Want to Look After a Starter Forever
When you create your own starter from scratch, you may be worried about keeping it alive which can be a lot of maintenance. However, if you buy your sourdough starter, you aren’t as tied to having to keep your starter alive indefinitely. If your starter fails, you can simply buy another as opposed to having to go through the process of creating another starter from scratch.
There is no pressure to continually bake sourdough bread. You can start and stop baking as you have time and feel like it.
We hope this helped you evaluate if you should buy a sourdough starter. We also wrote an article on 'What you should look for when buying a sourdough starter'.
