The Sourdough Starter
The starter, delivered in its own lidded bowl, will stay in your refrigerator, and can last forever with a little care. You also receive a bag of flour and detailed instructions.
Sourdough starters are cultures of wild natural yeasts that leaven your bread instead of mass-produced commercial baker’s yeast. When baking sourdough, you only use part of your starter – replacing what you take out with flour and water.
We call our peerless starter The London Leavening Standard, in a nod to its Fleet St connections. Brought into being by a journalist and baker in 1998 it has since risen to greater things, travelling the length and breadth of the country, as well as gaining a foothold as far afield as Australia and America. A proven performer, it has mothered thousands of loaves of the highest quality for two decades. Treat it well and it will return the favour.
NOTE: If this is a gift please be aware the starter needs to be refrigerated within 7 days and fed within 14 days. Please ensure your delivery date accommodates these timings.
Delivery within 3-5 working days of ordering
Lifting the Lid
on Starters
One of the key stumbling blocks for bakers new to sourdough is making your own starter. If everything goes to plan, it should be simple, but most people soon realise things usually don’t go to plan, and the results can be frustratingly hit or miss.
Some of the best advice we were given here at Crumb was to begin with an established starter so at least you know what a good sourdough starter looks and feels like, so at least you have a benchmark if you fancy trying to make your own later. But in truth, Crumb has never had such impressive results from other starters, homemade or otherwise, which is why The London Leavening Standard has pride of place in The Baker’s Dozen.
As an experiment, we have left the starter for over a month without feeding, and it has still provided perfect results, though it is best practice, if you are not baking regularly, to discard 300g of the starter every week or so, and replenish with fresh flour and water, but that is the only maintenance it will ever need (unlike some of the finnicky liquid starters that many other bakers use, which require careful feeding 24 hours before you plan to bake)