Goldie by Sourhouse Review: Keep Your Sourdough Starter in the Goldilocks Zone

I really like making bread, however I by no means had that sourdough-fanatic section that many individuals went via and plenty of spouses tolerated, typically fortunately. But Maurizio Leo’s improbable 2022 cookbook, The Perfect Loaf, opened my thoughts a bit, and a gadget at my favorite trade show obtained me to interrupt down and make some starter.

The gadget in query is known as the Goldie, made by an organization known as Sourhouse. It is designed to carry your starter within the “Goldilocks zone”—the vary between the mid-70s and mid-80s Fahrenheit—that’s hotter than room temperature however “not too sizzling” and “not too chilly.” The Goldie is a round heater with a fairly glass cloche on high that’s massive sufficient to surround a quart-sized jar of starter. It additionally comes with a cooling puck that you just toss within the freezer and bust out on sizzling days when the starter will get too heat.

I known as in a Goldie and two of the corporate’s seamless starter jars, together with two similar-size Weck canning jars. (Seamlessness is subsequent to godliness for starter makers.) This allowed me to create and chart the progress of two batches of starter. One batch would spend the entire time within the Goldie and the opposite in a heat spot on my kitchen counter subsequent to my rice cooker. Every batch used one in every of every jar.

Sourdough starter is the yeasty combination manufactured from flour and water that helps your bread rise and offers it that fantastic tangy bitter taste. For one thing that simply sits there all day, it is a surprisingly needy factor; caring for one is commonly in comparison with caring for a pet. It’s essential “refresh” starter a few times a day, relying on whose scripture you are studying. Leo has a bit heading in his ebook known as “Do I Have To Refresh My Starter Twice A Day … Endlessly?” His reply is a delicate, paragraph-long “sure.”

Refreshing is actually feeding the lively yeasts that you just domesticate in your starter jar. This implies pouring most of it—the “discard”—into the compost or finding a use for it, then including flour and heat water to what’s left, retaining you in a relentless, rolling provide of fortunately fermented goo. Refresh it on the common and your starter can outlive you. For these new to the method, there’s a complete sloppy section to undergo the place you prepare your self to make each refresh neater than the final. For me, this meant pouring a weight of “carryover” from the lively jar right into a clear and empty one, then including contemporary flour and heat water by weight.

I watched the Goldie and not-Goldie batches of starter transfer alongside via phases. They’d rise and fall, expertise good days and boring days, and odor bizarre earlier than taking up magical banana aromas. The additional in I obtained into the method, the extra attention-grabbing this grew to become. Ultimately, it became one thing that, to paraphrase Leo, was persistently bubbly, had a free texture and bitter odor, and tended to rise a bit daily. The factor I wasn’t noticing was a lot of a distinction between the Goldie and non-Goldie batches. Sure, perhaps tiny variations in odor and texture every now and then, however nothing that did not even out inside a day. Each batches have been clearly headed in the identical course.