SOURDOUGH STARTER STORAGE - How to Dry a Sourdough Starter

Now if you've joined me on the series about making a sourdough starter, you've got the
beautiful sourdough starter.
Now what are you going to do with it, well if you're baking regularly just keep it on
the side feed it each day, make your bread.
If you're only making sourdough every week or so then pop this into the fridge and chill
it, that will stop the yeast from developing and when you're ready to use it just remember
to bring it out three or four hours before.
Bring it up to room temperature, take about half a cup of the sourdough mixture out and
then feed back into it, equal quantities of water and flour, up to about again half a
cup and you will see within a few hours all the yeast will come back to life and you can
store this pretty much indefinitely.
You will have heard people keeping sourdough starters for many tens of years I believe
even 50 60 years plus but here's a dilemma maybe you just want to stop making sourdough
for six months or so and you don't want to look after it in the fridge or if like me
you've made this beautiful sourdough starter and I'm moving from Sicily, we've only been
here for a short while and going to a completely new location, is it possible to take this
with you?
I'll show you the best way to do that.
We're going to dry this sourdough out just like you would dried yeast.
Get yourself a nice sheet of baking paper and then we're going to take this beautiful
Airy sourdough starter and we're just going to spoon it onto the parchment paper, or baking
paper and then I've got a little crank handled spatula here and we're just going to push
this out, nice and flat so you
spread your sourdough out nice and thin
and evenly across some parchment like
this. Now it very much depends on the
environment you're in, the temperature,
the time of year but this can take
anywhere from one to maybe even three
days. When it's completely dry I'll show
you what we do with it. So you can see my
yeast dried out, it took about a day and
a half where I am but it's crisp as crisp can
be. So how are we going to store this? For
me I'm just going to take these bits of
dried yeast and I'm going to break them
up into a bowl, you can see it's almost,
it's almost like a cornflake consistency.
It's super dehydrated but the yeast is
still alive in this dried mixture. I'm
just going to crush it up a little bit
finer. Now because we are traveling in
Sicily at the moment I haven't got all
my kitchen equipment, I would probably
process this down to a fine powder or
use a mortar and pestle to make it to a
fine powder but it's not necessary, it's
just as simple to keep it like this in
the flakes and I'm going to store it in
a ziplock bag. So I just zip that closed
and that is it, there is my yeast I can
store it for many months, years even in
this dry form and you can take it with
you to another destination. Now I hope a
lot of you have found this useful,
if you want to rehydrate this by the way,
you can just add it back to water, start
feeding it again but I am thinking of
doing a video sometime in the future,
whether it's here in Sicily or maybe in
a different part of the world even, where
I'm going to use this yeast and
rehydrate it, just to explain to you how
simple it is. So look out for that video, I hope
you've enjoyed the bread series that
we're doing here on Steve's kitchen. Be
good,
I'll leave a link to the whole bread
series at the end of the video, take care,
share the love, give this the thumbs up
and I will see you in the next video

SOURDOUGH STARTER STORAGE - How to Dry a Sourdough Starter

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