I wanted to try out the new sourdough kit that I got, so I made a sourdough starter with yogurt. It didn’t go quite as the recipe I found said it would, though, so here are my tips if you want to create a starter this way!
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Why do you need a starter?
A sourdough starter is basically just creating a little gang of active yeast that you feed occasionally and keep alive. The air is full of microorganisms, and yeast is one of them. When you make a flour and water base, or yogurt in this case, you’re giving the yeast that’s in the air something to find and eat.
When they do that, they start reproducing and over time you’ll develop an active starter that you can use to leaven bread and other baked goods. Over time the starter will develop the distinctive sour flavor that sourdough bread has, and you won’t need to use commercial yeast from a jar to make bread.
Using yogurt with live active cultures will add those to the mix from the beginning, so the idea is that it will help to develop the starter faster, I guess. I was interested in seeing whether the yogurt starter would have a different flavor than the regular starter that I’ve been using. It’s not a totally fair test because the longer your starter is alive the tangier it gets, but we shall see…
Read this article for more sourdough starter information.
The sourdough kit, and day 1.
I got this kit as a sample from the Amish Chef, and it has everything you would need in it to make sourdough from start to finish. I wanted to start a new batch of starter, and I found a few recipes that basically said to combine equal amounts of yogurt and flour to do it.
The basic recipe that I used was 50 grams of flour and 50 grams of Greek yogurt (unsweetened, plain flavor.) I weighed everything out but it was so thick I ended up adding more yogurt, so I don’t know if the recipes were calling for weight or volume…I would do 1/4 cup of unbleached AP flour plus 1/4 cup of the yogurt to make a mixture that has enough moisture in it.
If you end up with a thick paste, you’re not going to get any reaction out of the starter mix, it needs some moisture in it, as you’ll see.
So on day 1, I put the mixture in the starter jar that came in the kit, set the little band with the date marker, covered it with the linen top, and set it on the counter to get going.
I really like the jar for the starter, the band with the date on it lets you change it so that you can see when you last fed the starter, and it has the little cap and also has a screw-on lid for storing the starter in the fridge once it’s ready to use.
Day 2.
On day 2 the mixture had done nothing, which isn’t unusual, but it also hadn’t dried out. The linen cover on the jar is tightly-woven and lets air in but it also keeps moisture in. I’ve had dough and starters dry out on the surface, but the cover in this set worked well.
I mixed in another 1/4 cup of flour and 1/4 cup of yogurt, and stirred it well. It was still really thick, but I went along with the recipe.
Day 3.
I saw absolutely no activity at all in the mixture, so I mixed in another 1/4 cup of flour and yogurt, but I also added a couple of tablespoons of water. I figured that I might as well, since nothing was going on. If the starter is too dry the activity is going to be slower, and I wanted to see at least a LITTLE something going on.
Day 4.
Now we’re getting somewhere! Adding the water loosened everything up and there was definitely something going on. The mixture had more than doubled in size, so the yeast was active and multiplying. I removed a half cup of the mixture and added in more flour and water to replace it, mixed it up, and let it sit until tomorrow.
Day 5.
Now that there was actual activity in the yeast, things were looking good. I took out 1/2 cup of starter and replaced it with 1/4 cup flour and 1/4 cup yogurt, and it was so active I had to keep coming back to thump the jar on the counter to deflate it. Adding the water was the key to getting it to start working.
The texture of this starter was very spongy, which was different from the starter that I made with flour and water. The more water you have in a starter the looser it will be, and this one was very dry relative to the other one.
Stirring this was like stirring a very thick muffin batter, the texture was very thick.
Here it is on the little stirrer that came with the sourdough kit…It wasn’t runny at all, so that probably slowed down the yeast activity, too. If you want a more bubbly starter you’ll need to increase the water in it.
Making a sponge with the yogurt starter.
On day 7 the starter was active and I used it to make a sponge so that I could make bread the next day. I removed half a cup of the starter, replacced it with 1/4 cup each of flour and yogurt, then I put the lid on the jar and put it in the fridge. That will slow down the yeast activity, and I’ll feed it once a week from now on.
I took the half cup of the starter and added it to a bowl with 1 1/2 cups of flour and 1 cup of water, mixed it up, and let it sit at room temperature for 24 hours. You need to leave a sponge for 12-36 hours to give the yeast time to activate and get ready to be used to leaven the bread.
After the 24 hours, I realized that I didn’t have time to make bread that day, so I put the bowl in the fridge until the next day. The cold would slow the activity down, and I could use it the next day. If you want to do this, you could also add some more flour and water to give the starter something to eat during the extended development time.
The finished bread.
I used the recipe for sourdough butter bread to make these loaves, and they tasted really good…They baked up a little pale, but the internal temperature was fine so I took them out of the oven and let them cool off. When we cut them later to test them out they were delicious, the bread had a good flavor and the crumb was tight enough to use for sandwiches. Another recipe to try with this would be the basic sourdough bread recipe that makes a couple of loaves.
The yogurt starter worked well, and with the change of adding some water to the mix, it activated right about when I would have expected it to. This is a good way to start a sourdough starter with some additional active bacteria, but remember to add the water if the recipe says that just flour and yogurt will work! The water makes it better.
