Breadtopia Live Sourdough Starter | Organic Non-GMO Ingredients | Active & Ready to Go | It's Alive - Must be Fed Immediately on Delivery

I’ve tried off and on to learn how to make sourdough bread, always craving that San Francisco sour taste and texture we all love. I have ordered King Arthur starters in the past, but always gave up. The flavor was never there, and every loaf was too dense. This go-around, I decided to order a new starter from Amazon for fast shipping, and I’m so glad that I did. I can’t keep up with this very active starter! It is like a pet that needs constant feeding! And so that translates to dough that rises and has nice big bubbles in the texture. And the sour flavor is there! I am a hero at home with sourdough bread coming out of the oven at least 3 times a week. And that’s with me working full time. Here is my process, using King Arthur’s recipe and a few other things I’ve learned: If dinner plans for the next day involve sourdough bread, then the evening before, when I arrive home from work, I take my starter out of the fridge, give it a little stir and feed it about 1/4 cup of flour. I leave it on the countertop while going about our evening routine. A couple hours later, after the family has had dinner and the kitchen is cleaned, and I’m about to close the kitchen for the night, I’ll start the bread. The starter by now looks happy and bubbly. Almost foamy bubbly. You can take off a pinch and put it into a cup of water. It will float if it is ready. So then I pour about a cup of the starter into a container that has a lid. At least a 2 liter container. Then I go back to feed my starter up to a cup of flour (depending on how much room is in my jar) and an equal amount of water, mix, cover, and return to fridge. Then back to the container of freshly poured starter, I add 3 cups unbleached white flour and 1.5 cups water. Stir really briskly for 1 minute. Cover and put in fridge for the night. The next morning before work, I add 2.5 teaspoons kosher or Himalayan salt, and 1 more cup of flour. I stir this just till the flour is absorbed. The dough looks kind of raggedy, but the salt and flour is mixed in enough to start the next phase. Let this sit for 30 minutes. Then just before leaving to work, add up to a cup more of flour while kneading into a soft and slightly sticky dough (feels tacky but doesn’t stick to hands). I can’t usually get more than a 1/2 cup in there. So for the recipe I end up using a total of 4.5 cups. The recipe calls for up to 5 cups.you don’t want the dough to be too heavy bc you’ll love the light airy and bubbly texture of the finished bread. Knead until smooth. Return the dough to the container and keep covered. This will be about 1 liter of dough. Now if someone isn’t home to help me with the next steps, I’ll bring the dough to work. This just means i won’t be able to start cooking it until 5:30 or so. The next process is easy. Every hour, the dough needs to be gently lifted and stretched and folded over itself while carefully preserving the air that has filled the dough. Having slightly wet hands helps. Go around the container and do this 4 times to get all 4 quarters of the dough lifted and folded over itself then cover and wait another hour. Each time you do this, you’ll notice the dough is changing! After 4 or 5 times, the dough is ready to rise in its proofing container. This is about 2:00 pm for me. I get a piece of parchment paper and a bowl about the size of a regular sourdough boulle. I wet the parchment paper and wring it out like a wash rag so it is soft and mouldable to the size of the bowl. Line the bowl with the wet paper. Then lift the dough out of the container, being careful not to lose any of the air that has developed in the dough. Remember there is no added yeast helping out your starter. The starter is doing all the work, so try not to lose what it has done for you. Gently fold into a soft ball of dough, tucking edges underneath till top is smooth. Lay the dough gently into the parchment paper-lined bowl. Cover, and let rise 2 hours. Preheat oven to 425° with a lidded Dutch oven inside that is about the size of a sourdough boulle. The Dutch oven pot will get very hot. Cut a 1/4” deep slice or two across the top of the dough at this point. When the oven is preheated, remove the Dutch oven and lift the dough by the parchment paper, carefully setting it down into the hot pot. Put the lid on the pot and return to the hot oven. After 20 minutes, remove the lid. Continue baking until the bread is a deep golden brown. Remove from the pot, pulling up by the parchment paper to lift. Set your beautiful bread on a cooking rack. Discard the parchment paper. Allow to cool completely before cutting!!! That is the hardest part!! My favorite way to eat is toasted with butter. My family also likes to add honey. It is also delicious plain! Good quality flour is important. If your flour has a cheap smell to it, do not use! I also use filtered water to both feed my starter and for my recipe.

I've used this company before, and though delivery can be slow, the product is excellent. I use this starter as my trusty back-up now. I've grown my own AND while waiting for my other "experiments" to mature, I use Seymour, made from excellent Breadtopia heirloom starter. Do NOT believe the negative reviews. Those people clearly mishandled their starter, and that's no fault of Breadtopia. Plenty of helpful info at their site & online in general. HIGHLY RECOMMEND

Omgosh this starter is amazing ! I did my research and I’m glad I choose this starter. Within days I was baking bread. Not a perfect loaf but I was anxious to start. Now that my starter is about two weeks old it’s incredible. PERFECTION 😘

This yeast is fabulous. I've made sourdough for decades and this is by far the best sourdough starter I have ever used. And it is easy to care for it. Using this yeast and slightly modifying Breadtopia’s recipe (I omitted the whole wheat flour and used the best of white flours: Bob’s Red Mill Unbromated Unbleached White Bread Flour, and King Arthur’s Unbleached White Bread Flour) my first try resulted in a loaf that tasted as good as the best San Francisco Sourdough bread. Thank you. Breadtopia for your starter and your recipes!!! For those unfamiliar with using sourdough starter, it is a yeast culture that you can store in the refrigerator in a jar, and as long as you use or feed it (add a little more flour and water) weekly, it remains healthy and will make countless loaves of bread. Packaged yeast is good for one loaf! Commercial style yeast rises quickly and basically adds air holes to dough. If you try to convert it to starter, you must let it reproduce or ferment overnight, and most packaged yeast produces a lot of alcohol as a byproduct if allowed to ferment overnight which ruins the flavor. In contrast, the natural wild yeast in historical traditional sourdough starters is the kind of yeast used to bake bread over many centuries. It is slow rising and the dough must rest overnight to rise. However, its fermentation results in a pleasant sour flavor (like yogurt, it has a tangy flavor rather than the flavor of alcohol produced by faster rising yeasts). And this slower acting wild yeast does more than add air holes to the dough. It transforms the dough, giving it an entirely new fluffy sponge texture which is characteristic of good sourdough. The gluten in this sourdough is reduced to minimal, and healthwise, gluten is a problem for many people, so this wild yeast offers another way to minimize gluten while enjoying the wonderful texture and flavor of genuine sourdough bread--which I consider to be the best bread ever. (First thing I noticed about this yeast was this transformation— the dough was so fluffy it looked as if the gluten had been predigested by the yeast (bread makers call this fermentation), then I looked on Breadtopia’s site and found an article about this. Another advantage of the lack of gluten in this sourdough is that it makes excellent pizza dough. And even a bread baking mistake can make a premium pizza. Most of my loaves of bread came out close to perfect. One day I let the dough rise too long, and it fell. I tried doing a third rise, but it only rises twice! So, I divided the dough and wrapped and froze half of it, refrigerating the other half. Two days later, I added 1 teaspoon baking powder (BP) and 1/2 teaspoon baking soda (soda) to the dough. Then I spread it out on a pizza pan oiled with olive oil, and baked it for about 10 minutes at 365 degrees until just barely done, but not yet beginning to brown. Then I removed it from the oven, added sauce and toppings, and cooked it for 10-15 minutes longer. It had the wonderful flavor of sourdough, plus it was crusty on the bottom, with a soft but fully cooked middle. This dough does not get gluey in the middle like some. [I soon plan to try the same with the frozen dough, hoping that it can be made ahead, frozen,and thawed, adding BP and soda just prior to baking.]

Excellent sourdough starter! Check out the photo, which I took after 4 days of feeding. It is a very active starter! And... I'll admit, I accidentally neglected to activate it until 8 days after I received it! The video instructions are spot-on. The first two feedings I did not see any rise and very little bubbling. But the third day it doubled. And the fourth day it more than doubled. Today I'm making sourdough bread! Now mind you, I use the Yendse Sourdough Starter warmer to keep the temperature right at 79F/26C and retain humidity. I've tried reconstituting powdered starter. It worked. But this is SO much easier and quicker (especially with the Breadtopia video tutorial). I HIGHLY recommend this Breadtopia Sourdough Starter!

I’ve only ever used this starter but typically get the dried starter (10/10 on that one too!) but this was sooooo muuuchhh easier (as long as you are home when you receive it in hot humid weather 🤣) perfect starter!! Bubbly in hours after first initial small feeding! I’m not a fan of the more liquid starters so the texture was odd at first but after I revived her with the couple initial feedings I switched to MY typical maintenance schedule which she reaaaaaalllly loved 100g flour and equal grams water 👍🏻 that really helped on texture. She smells amazing and looks amazing and is what my pregnant butt has been craving for so long but sadly during my move when I got married I killed the yeasty boys. This one is Mrs. Puff because she blows all the lids off the containers 😅 great value for money 👍🏻 the photo included was 10 minutes after first maintenance feeding much bubblier than photo says and I fed a couple more times (it was late one of the nights so had to feed again before using the next day) but yeah after ten minutes she was on the rise!! Our house is warm and we live in a more tropical environment so that could also be helping her out but yeah I would definitely send this to family members and friends who live farther away if they want some good starter and an easy to do one!

I can’t believe it worked the first time! It takes patience to feed your yeast water and flour for up to four days to get a sozeable amount of sourdough starter, and I discovered at the end that if you turn in your oven briefly to get it to 90F, it works great to speed up proofing or rising. I purchased a second starter on Amazon and made both. This one is clearly the winner for the glossy outer crust and nice large holes inside. The only downside, which may be my inexperience, is that it is not as sour as my favorite Boudin, however maybe extra starter will help that in the future. Very impressed. Also, don’t forget to purchase a good kitchen scale. Most bread recipes are by weight and not cups. To keep the bread moist while cooking, I used baking parchment with a clear Pyrex bowl over the top of a metal grill plate. It worked wonderfully to keep it moist. The larger boule was made in a cast iron dutch style pot, again to keep the moisture inside for the first 20 min. The free recipe I used was “ Sourdough Bread: A Beginner’s Guide” from the clever carrot, but there are many out there. Happy Baking!

This starter came alive immediately after feeding it. It's very vigorous and has excellent leavening qualities. It just takes a couple of hours after feeding to bring it to full, bubbling potency. It also seems to be very robust, after sitting in the fridge unfed for well over a week it just takes one feeding to bring it back to full potency immediately. If there was anything to complain about it's that the first few breads I baked with this starter were almost too sour. Almost, they still tasted great, but the sourdough flavor might be somewhat overwhelming for someone not used to it. It's very easy though to "sweeten" it and obtain a much milder sourdough flavor. This is what I did: First, when feeding it don't just double its volume, but quadruple it. I.e. for a given weight of sourdough starter (e.g. 100 grams) add 1.5 times that weight in flour (150 grams) and 1.5 times that weight in water (150 grams), to obtain four times the original weight of the starter (in this example 400 grams). Use this quadrupled amount of starter immediately after it has come to full potency to make your bread dough, which in my case only took about 4 hours. Second, use a high ratio of this quadrupled starter in relation to flour when making your bread dough. I used 550 grams of the starter, fed as described above, with about 526 grams of flour (a mixture of all purpose, whole wheat and whole spelt). In baker's percentage terms this means my final bread dough consisted of well over 100% starter (more than 100% starter weight in relation to flour weight). The resulting bread had a very mild, almost indiscernible sourdough flavor. Other breads I baked with starter fed with less flour and water, and less starter in relation to final bread weight, had a very noticeable tangy flavor. All variations in between are possible. What you need to know is that the yeast multiplies much faster than the lactic acid bacteria, so feeding the starter more flour and water, using it sooner after feeding, and using a higher amount of starter to leaven the bread will result in more yeast development and less lactic acid development, and subsequently in a milder flavor, while feeding the starter less flour and water, letting it sit longer, and using less starter to leaven the bread will result in a more tangy sourdough flavor. With this particular starter, you can achieve both extremes and anything in between, thus I would highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in varying the flavor of his/her bread. Happy baking!

C'est une première pour moi. Je n'avais jamais fait de pain au levain auparavant. J'ai suivi la recette d'une personne qui a mis son avis sur ce levain. Et tadaaaa! Résultat incroyable! Un pain au bon goût de levain. Moelleux, léger, croustillant sur le dessus! J'ai suivi les instructions de la vidéo pour l'activation du levain. Super facile. Mon levain a doublé de volume comme prévu. J'ai utilisé une farine bio et de l'eau filtrée à température ambiante. Je recommande le produit!!

Starter arrived as promised, and was not over "stressed" and there were no issues. Worth the price if you don't have time to attempt to start your own. Highly recommend.

I didn’t expect it t come as a thick paste (honestly thought it was dehydrated) but getting it going was easy….got a BEAUTIFUL loaf, my hubby loves sourdough bread

Très bon produit

Makes great bread