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| |  | | Home » San Francisco Sourdough Starter | | | | | | | Description: | | If you crave sourdough bread from San Francisco, this is the starter for you.
Our San Francisco starter contains Lactobacillus sanfrancisco bacteria and wild yeast Candida humilis giving this sourdough starter that famous San Francisco taste. Easy to care for and use. For best results, we recommend feeding your sourdough starter weekly. This sourdough starter is available as a dehydrated culture. Dehydrated sourdough starters are shelf stable and do not have to be fed or cared for immediately (making them more appropriate for busy individuals or to be given as a gift). Dehydrated sourdough starters can be ready to create baked goods within 3-5 days. Detailed instructions will be included with your order. | | | Features: | |
• Easy to use sourdough starter
• Can be used to make a variety of baked goods
• For best results, feed your sourdough starter weekly
• Shipped as a dehydrated starter culture
• Can be ready to create baked goods within 3-5 days
| | | Product Details: | | | Product Length:
| 5.0 inches | | Product Width:
| 0.05 inches | | Product Height:
| 7.0 inches | | Product Weight:
| 0.06 pounds | | Package Length:
| 6.3 inches | | Package Width:
| 4.7 inches | | Package Height:
| 0.1 inches | | Package Weight:
| 0.01 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 26 reviews |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
Average Customer Review:
 ( 26 customer reviews )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
61 of 61 found the following review helpful:
 Creamy bread without commercial yeast, but read on for "sour"Feb 21, 2011
By Debbie Lee Wesselmann
If you follow the supplied directions, you'll get an active sourdough starter within days; however, keep in mind that not all sourdough is sour, so you'll have to take some extra steps to get the San Francisco tang. I bought this culture to add to my existing sourdough starter (which IS sour) to make the flavor more complex but ended up instead keeping two separate starters, simply because this one is so good. Newcomers to sourdough may be disappointed with the taste until they learn the proper techniques to achieve the type of bread flavor they want.
To begin, "sourdough" refers not to the taste, but to the method, which uses wild yeast and bacteria to create a sponge to be used in place of commercial yeast. This culture will do exactly that. In three days, I had such an active starter that my bread rose quickly, even in a winter-temperature house. The bread was creamy, with an excellent crumb, although, because the starter was brand new, it tasted like white bread with a little character, something I expected but which may surprise beginners. This was my first test of the starter to make sure it worked properly. And it did. Perfectly. If you are buying this starter as a natural leavening agent and not as a sour bread maker, then skip to the last two paragraphs of this review.
Most people who consider buying this culture will want their bread to taste sour, as it does in San Francisco. They are not looking for a yeast substitute. If this describes you, read on.
San Francisco sourdough bread, with its distinctive tang, requires certain steps to enhance yeast- and bacteria-based fermentation. Here are my tips for creating a more "sour" taste using this culture: 1. When keeping the starter at room temperature, feed it less frequently once it has become established. The instructions suggest feeding once every 12 hours (two feedings a day), but I find that once every 24 hours creates a more sour tasting starter. 2. Leaving the starter in the refrigerator for a week, unfed, and then pulling it back out for one feeding, then a sponge feeding 24 hours later, improves the sourness. 3. The instructions tell you to throw out all but 1/4 cup between feedings or to use 1/4 cup from your refrigerated starter. I keep/use at least one cup, sometimes two, and give it the same amount of "food" -- 1/2 cup water and slightly less than 1 cup flour. Just make sure that the final sponge is rising correctly before you use it. Once you get to know your starter, you'll know how much food and time it needs to fully activate. 4. Allow the shaped loaves to rise in the refrigerator overnight or up to 24 hours to allow for more fermentation. As the yeast and bacteria consume the available nutrients, the dough will get sticky from the alcohol by-products, so don't expect to handle it again. 5. If you are using a bread machine to knead the dough, use the French bread setting since that will lengthen the kneading/rising time, OR, if you are kneading by hand or mixer, complete two full risings. 6. Hot sourdough always tastes less sour than it will at room temperature. Yes, it's difficult not to cut into the loaf right away, but try to let it cool to warm before serving. If you always eat the bread hot out of the oven, without having leftovers, then you'll never taste the full tang. 7. If you only care about the tang and not about the rising power, check out The Bread Lover's Bread Machine Cookbook. Hensperger provides several recipes for starters and bread that are much cheaper than buying this culture. The recipes use a combination of starter and commercial yeast, but they yield a nice sour bread.
The key to sour bread is fermentation, so anything you can do to promote it will enhance the tang. This includes stirring any hooch, or alcohol, back into the starter.
Other tips for this culture: never use chlorinated water and never store in a metal container. I don't even use metal utensils, although this is probably overkill. Supposedly, metal can both inhibit growth and discolor the starter. Since sourdough starters improve over time, you can expect the flavor to improve with every passing week, provided that you care for it. If you follow the instructions, you will have a thick starter, not as thick as a dough starter but not as liquid as a batter type. Of course, you can make this into either type with different flour/water ratios.
This starter arrives in dried, powdered form in a small packet. It comes with can't-fail directions for reactivating and maintaining the starter. You will need non-chlorinated water, unbleached flour, and a glass or plastic container that holds at least four cups. (I use a glass Pyrex measuring cup so I can tell exactly how much starter I have.) Plan on at least five days between first feeding and first loaf because you will need a highly active starter to properly leaven the bread. You can revert to the 24-hour feedings once the starter rises substantially in the container.
-- Debbie Lee Wesselmann
45 of 48 found the following review helpful:
WOW, Better Sour Dough Bread Than We Can BuyFeb 28, 2010
By SmallBizOwner
"Focused on Results"
This company really sends out a great sour dough starter and instructions. I recommend you also buy the Sour Dough Starter Kit that comes with the wide mouth jar and recipe book. We followed their instruction exactly and the bread turned out better than any Sour Dough that we can purchase from a store, really nice and chewy, and is incredible when toasted. They show you how to make it extra sour by "feeding" it with more flour and water over time. We used pure filtered water and King Arthur Unbleached Bread Flour in our recipe, my wife and I really got excited about how great it tasted. We let it rise 2 times, and did an extra rise overnight. The dough was so bouncy that I am going to try and make pizza dough next. I tried other sour dough companies on Amazon, but this one is the best. As a native San Franciscan I appreciate great sour bread, and this is the greatest. Just be sure to give it extra "feedings" in order to get that extra sour taste. Making this type of bread takes TLC, but the time you put into it will pay big dividends. It is going to be fun trying their other starters, such as the Alaskan and Italian starters. We are into Whole Foods and like to cook things ourselves so we know what is in the product. The recipe we used had flour, starter, water, honey, milk, and salt, that's it hard to believe it made such wonderful bread.
18 of 18 found the following review helpful:
Real Sour Dough!Feb 07, 2010
By Fire 304
As promised, a very flavorful authentic bay area sourdough starter. As with all sourdoughs, it is pretty slow rising and requires some fore planning if you want it for a specific meal, but well worth the effort. We activated the culture then split it and froze a part of it, eventually we suspect that the local yeast and bacteria will contaminate this non native (to our area) culture and it will become diluted, so we'll be able to restart it and restore the flavor.
12 of 12 found the following review helpful:
Great starter!Nov 15, 2009
By Robert C. Stich
I received the packet of dry starter in just a few days. I followed the instructions that came with it for bringing the dry starter to life, and the new starter took right off as it was supposed to.
I've been making excellent bread with it and have passed on jars of this starter to friends. So far no problems, except I want to learn how to give my bread a more sour tang. I'm looking forward to making sourdough pancakes and waffles with it.
5 of 5 found the following review helpful:
Just Too Easy!Oct 09, 2010
By Margaret
This sourdough starter is probably the best thing I've ever ordered on the internet. I'm not a novice baker, but had thought that sourdough would be too long, too messy, and end up like my first sourdough loaf (when I made my own starter), hard as stone and sour as vinegar. What a surprise! I followed the very clear and well-written instructions and voila! Two loaves of incredible bread. We love it! Now we don't buy bread at the grocery any more. At $5.00 a loaf, for the healthy nutty kind, it's far below the quality of what I can now make in my own kitchen, and I know exactly what goes into it.
I have discovered that the kind of flour does make a difference. The first dozen or so loaves I made were a mix of King Arthur whole wheat and Gold Medal white. Then I bought a bag of King Arthur unbleached white whole wheat flour and found that the dough did not behave or rise nearly as well as with all whole wheat or a mix with regular white flour. I can't find any of the more exotic flours in our town but plan to order some to experiment with. My variation on the basic recipe was to add chopped nuts, raisins, cinnamon and sugar. These ingredients did better when I kneaded them in, rather than add them during the sponge stage.
Do try this starter. It's really spunky stuff, and so much fun to work with!
See all 26 customer reviews on Amazon.com
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