71: SOURDOUGH - The Scrapings Method, No Waste, No Discard - Bake with Jack

The thought of throwing away sourdough starter on a regular basis put me off making sourdough bread for ages until (I thought) I invented "the scrapings method". Here's how to make a sourdough loaf without throwing anything away.

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[corinacerbu]

My grandma used to bake once a week. She would leave a small amount of starter left, add flour (a lot) until it became almost crumbly, add another layer of flour on top, put the lid on an pop in the fridge. She would take it out one day before baking, add water (basically rehydrating it), stir it well, and leave it feed until the next day. The next day, she would use most of it for the bread and repeat.

[juliaaquaamateur]

This is exactly what my grandma did, as well as her grandma did, and so on down to prehistoric times. She simply kept a dirty pot after making another loaf, or pancackes, or whatever. Well, of course, the dough itself was made in a huge bowl, and the pot was used simply to make leaven for the dough. Even if it dried out, it still worked after she put some flour and water to the "dirty pot". She lived in a village in Belorussia :)

[amyoungil]

"I don't have to learn how to make waffles." Hahah! Thanks Jack! I've always hated tossing half! There's no way pioneer women had so much freaking flour they would say, "Yes, just toss it. Life is so easy, washing clothes with water I've pulled up from the well and soap I made myself by saving fat from ultralean livestock and baking bread with flour that was hauled across 4 states and has to last my homestead for 7 months of winter in North Dakota. Just toss half every day."

[Bhakti]

This is absolute genius!!! This is one reason that was stopping me from even attempting sourdough bread. Keeping a starter fed and alive seemed like having a pet! I love this no-trouble method and it works!!!! Thank you, Jack!

[mrjohnny]

Thanks, Jack, for helping debunk the elitist "sourdough conspiracy": that it is too difficult, complicated and unforgiving for the home baker. After all "sourdough" was the only way to bake bread before commercial yeast. If our grannies and great grannies could do it, so can we. Cheers!

[maxmax]

I just want to say thankyou Jack. I'm disabled and needed something to occupy myself so I took up baking a bit of bread. Last week I nearly threw in the towel, I was constantly getting tight, sunken, depressing loaves. Until I stumbled across your channel and in episode you talked about the importance of creating Tension. Now you tell me that I do not need to feed Edgar twice a day and all I need is old dirty pot. Sincerely Thankyou and I look forward to watching many more hrs of informative, humorous teaching.

[craftynangran]

No need to keep searching for a way to make a sourdough starter without feedings and discards, (never made sense to me.) Now that I have found your video I have the confidence to try it out. I am 74 years and looking forward to making my first sourdough bread as soon as I stop belly 😂

[elizabethhumphrey]

Oh so pleased to hear was getting really fed up with binning half of the mixture. I mean how many pancakes can you eat before you need to buy new jeans?

[PurpleDragonFlyWings]

That’s exactly what I searched for today. “No throw away sourdough starter”! I am also annoyed by throwing ingredients away. I can’t wait to try this!

[dbattleaxe]

I'm new to sourdough baking but have prior experience with yeasts brewing mead and this makes so much sense to me. When I heard about having to feed starter every day, it clashed so much with my other experience of how yeasts behave, I just had to look into it. The yeasts used for brewing are specific strains bread for alcohol tolerance and which keytone and alcohol side products they produce, but wild yeasts are still just as hard to kill from neglect. Once they run out of food they hibernate but they sure aren't dead. Even after the yeasts have mostly settled to the bottom after months of ageing, it still isn't safe to back sweeten and bottle without adding sulfites to suppress yeast growth or sterile filtration because even one yeast cell will multiply with the new food and the released CO2 will blow up the bottle. You can even re-use the yeast in brewing after they've settled out and have been sitting for weeks. The only real issue from that could be if other strains contaminated it or the stresses caused unwanted evolution. Even if some start to die, it would take so long to kill all of the billions of yeast that the chances of there not being any alive to multiply again just seemed like such an odd idea to me. Sure it might take a bit longer for them to multiply back to their original levels, but actually killing all of them is really really hard to do. If they all died after using up their food source without any sticking around until another meal came along, they would have a hard time existing as a species to begin with. Yeasts are tenacious. Give them food and even if there's only a few they'll start exponentially multiplying like crazy.

[DaRedStallion]

I was always appalled by the thought of throwing away stuffs (esp food) where thousands are dying because they can't eat. Thanks a lot Jack for showing us the way to make sourdough breads without wasting. Much appreciated.

[PsychedelicGoo]

I love your keep-it-simple attitude! So refreshing.

[richardharris]

I've only baked a few sourdough a thus far, but I've honestly just been chucking stuff in a jar, not weighing it, and just eye balling how much I put into the dough mixture. It's made some really beautiful loaves. I am getting the impression the main reason most people don't make sourdough is because of the terrible 12 page recipes out there, it's not difficult to make a really good sourdough loaf if you get and understanding of what's happening and think about things a little differently to your regular yeast breads.

[Joe-bmwx]

I've left my starter in the fridge for a year before. Took it out, mixed it up and fed it. Came right back to life!

[gerdavogel]

I wish I hadn’t just watched this, I nearly chocked on my sourdough waffle (with apricot jam) that I had made to use up some starter. Am still chuckling!

[M]

After overcomplicating my life with fussy starter feeding rituals, I came back to your jar scraping method and found some sanity at last.

[mitchjohnson]

I'm proud to say that I discovered this method by myself as well. One time I had way too much starter and I just threw it all out and added flour and water to the remaining bowl. The next day it was happier than ever! It clicked. I realized I could just use the whole starter on my baking and then revive the leftovers the next week.

[roykelsey]

Fantastic Jack. You've spoken my mind! I too was reluctant to start sourdough because of the discard situation, and the prospect of learning how to cope with throwing away perfectly good ingredients or learning how to make other bakery goods with the surplus starter, when all I really wanted was a sourdough loaf! And, as a Yorkshireman I couldn't see myself chucking stuff in the bin. What a dilemma. So, I never even got started.

Along comes Jack The Lad to the rescue as usual. With his promise of a 'no discard' method he had me on the hook. Now we've got the full picture, we have the info to give it a go at last.

Thanks again Jack, for your marvellous, no-punches-pulled style. And yes please. Keep doing what you're doing. That's fine by me. and I'm certain I'm not alone.

As soon as I can get a few things sorted out, I'm going to make the journey south and join you on one of your Sourdough courses.

Just a couple of questions to finish off if I may please?

In the method you only mention covering the dough at one point. Would you cover it for each proving?

And, ....Bringing back a sleeping starter. You say it might need a couple of feeds to get it active. Would you feed it the same quantity of flour and water at 24 hour intervals each time (which would then end up with a much bigger volume - maybe even double by this time- than would be needed for the recipe)? Or would you mind explaining a bit more about waking up a sleeping starter please?

Many thanks, and kind regards from Norfolk.
Roy Kelsey

[powderriverfarrier]

Gotta feel sorry for other teachers. We had to wait until came along to get a simple, clear explanation of the sourdough starter and process. Makes me want to make a contribution to Jack's paypal. Yeah. Think I'm gonna do just that. Thanks mate for the easy to understand video.

[shaunjayes]

Love your common sense approach to sourdough bread.
Initially I was so put off by all the YouTube’r’s treating their starter like some sort of sacred pet, I was too scared to even try to make it.
It’s not nearly as complicated as people make out.
I once neglected my starter for 3 months, fed it twice, made my levain, and it was perfect.