• Add the flours and water to a 1 litre kilner jar (or similar), stir well, cover with muslin, leave the lid slightly open & put in your chosen warm place.
• If making from scratch or wanting to prepare the starter to make a loaf, feed twice a day.
Once a day is enough to maintain the starter, & once established it can also be stored in the fridge without feeding from approximately 2 weeks.
• You’ll know your starter is active & ready to use when you see bubbles in it.
• I don’t advocate the whole ‘discard’ thing with sourdough, but it’s best to clean the jar well roughly every 3 days, & if you find that by feeding the starter daily you’re making more than you need or want, you could either throw some away or change the way you use it, i.e. build it up & make a few loaves at once which you can then freeze, or store the starter in the fridge & bring out only when you want to make a loaf.
• Nb: This particular starter tends to be quite smelly! If you find this too off-putting you can switch to just brown rice flour & leave out the buckwheat.
I prefer the texture & quality of this combination, but brown rice flour alone does work well.
• Also, you may sometimes see a pinkish tinge to the starter. This is nothing to worry about & is just because buckwheat is apparently somehow related to beetroots!
• Finally, people often worry that they’ve killed their starter.
As I said in the beginning, they’re not as easy to kill as people make out, although for some reason the gluten-free ones aren’t quite as robust as the conventional ones.
Thankfully though they do make it pretty obvious when they’re a lost cause; the smell will be clearly ‘off’, & you may see fluffy mold especially on the sides of the jar.
If this is the case, you’ll need to throw it away & start again.
Some people like to keep a backup in the fridge so you don’t need to start completely from scratch if this happens.
