The Friend Who Finally Got Me Into Sourdough (And What I Did With That)

⏱ 5 min read

It Started With a Jar on a Kitchen Counter

A couple of years back, I was round at my mate Dan's place in Hackney. He'd just moved in and was showing me the flat, and on the counter was this glass jar with what looked like a beige paste in it. I asked him what it was. He said "my starter" with the same casual energy you'd use to say "my keys." Like everyone just had one of these things sitting around.

Dan had been baking sourdough for about six months at that point. He pulled out a loaf he'd made that morning, cut a few slices, and we ate it with some decent butter while he explained what the jar actually was. A living culture. Wild yeast and bacteria that he fed every day. The thing that made his bread rise, gave it flavour, gave it that crust.

I work in tech. I spend a lot of my day thinking about systems, inputs, outputs, what breaks and why. Something about the logic of a sourdough starter clicked for me immediately. It is essentially a fermentation engine. You feed it, it works for you. Neglect the inputs, the outputs suffer. Simple.

I went home that evening and did what I always do when something grabs my attention: I went deep on it.

The First Few Weeks Were Genuinely Humbling

I tried building a starter from scratch. Flour, water, time. I followed three different guides simultaneously because I couldn't just trust one source (classic developer behaviour, honestly). The first attempt smelled like nail varnish remover by day four and never really recovered. The second one seemed to be doing something, but the rise was sluggish and inconsistent, and the bread I eventually made with it was dense enough to use as a doorstop.

What I didn't fully appreciate at the time is how much a starter's history matters. A culture that's been developed and maintained over time, properly balanced and genuinely active, behaves differently to something you've coaxed into existence over a fortnight in your kitchen. The microbial community is more stable. The fermentation is more predictable. Your results are more consistent, especially when you're still learning everything else at the same time.

Eventually I got hold of the Classic Sourdough Starter from doughrise.store, and it was a genuinely different experience from day one. The activity was obvious and reliable. When I fed it and left it on the counter, it peaked in a reasonable timeframe. When I used it in a dough, I could actually see what a properly fermented loaf was supposed to look like. It gave me a baseline I could learn from, rather than constantly wondering whether my problems were the starter's fault or mine.

Spring Is Actually the Best Time to Start This

If you've been thinking about getting into sourdough, March is a genuinely good moment. The kitchen temperature starts to climb a bit as we come out of winter, which makes fermentation more active and more readable. In January, a bulk ferment that should take six hours can stretch to eight or nine in a cold flat. Right now, things are more forgiving. You're working with the environment rather than against it.

There's something else, too. Spring feels like the right time to start something new. Maybe that's just the longer evenings, or the fact that the farmers' markets are coming back to life and there's better produce around to put on top of what you bake. Either way, the energy is right.

A few practical things I'd tell anyone starting out this time of year:

• Keep your starter somewhere consistently warm, ideally between 21 and 24 degrees Celsius. On top of the fridge works well in a lot of kitchens.
• Feed it at the same time each day while you're getting it established. Consistency in inputs leads to consistency in behaviour.
• Don't stress if it smells a bit sharp or alcoholic sometimes. That's normal. A healthy starter smells pleasantly sour, almost yoghurty, when it's at peak activity.
• Start with a simple white loaf before you start experimenting. Get familiar with what good fermentation looks and feels like before you complicate things.

Where I Am Now

Dan still bakes. We catch up at the pub most Fridays and bread comes up more often than you'd expect. He's moved on to more ambitious stuff, long cold retards, high-hydration loaves, all of that. I've been doing a lot of pizza lately, which feels like a natural extension of the same skills, just a different shape.

But I think about that jar on his counter sometimes. The thing that surprised me most about getting into sourdough wasn't the technique or even the science. It was how much patience it requires. I live in London, I work in a fast-moving industry, I'm used to things being immediate. Sourdough doesn't care about any of that. You set it up, you leave it alone, you come back and see what's happened. There's something genuinely good about that.

If you're at the beginning of that journey, or you've tried and found your homemade starter unreliable, starting with something like the Classic Sourdough Starter from DoughRise just removes one variable from an already complex process. It lets you focus on learning the craft rather than troubleshooting the foundation.

Spring's here. Good time to start.

Happy baking! Find everything you need at doughrise.store

Photo by Xuancong Meng on Unsplash