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I've been doing this for 13 years. I've been doing sourdough. I feel still like I'm not an expert. I think because of the way I do sourdough and the way I see other people doing sourdough on blogs and very official YouTube channels and all of this, I sometimes feel like I don't know what I'm doing. But I think a lot of you could really use that kind of advice. The practical ways of getting sourdough into your family's diet and life without it having to be perfect, without it having to be official and carefully weighed, it definitely can be done very intuitively with a flow. My name is Lisa, mother of eight and creator of the blog and YouTube channel Farmhouse on Boone. Join me as I share with you my love for creating a handmade home from scratch cooking and a little mom and entrepreneur life along the way. Welcome back to the Simple Farmhouse Life podcast. Today I'm going to be answering sourdough questions. I. I had a Q and A box. You guys know you've been putting questions in it all year and we collected together all of the ones pertaining to sourdough to do this sourdough specific episode. So if you have a question about your sourdough, who knows what else we'll go into? Stay tuned. All right, so the first set of questions has to do with flavor. What's the technique for making sweet sourdough recipes not taste so sour? How to make my sourdough bread taste more sour. How to make it taste less sour. So this really comes down to science. And what happens with sourdough is the longer something has to ferment, usually the more sour it's going to be. So in order to manipulate how sour the bread is, there's a few things that you can do. One is if your starter is more sour so it's fed less often, it develops a lot of hooch. That's something that will make your bread more sour. That starter wouldn't be quite as active. So for the bread to properly do its bulk rise and its second rise, it's going to have to have more time for that starter to work on the grains. So that's going to make it more sour. One great way to do this if you're looking to make your bread more sour, I think usually it's the opposite. But some people are looking to make it more sour is to do a really long fridge rise so you can do your bulk ferment at room temperature. Shape it, get it into bannetons, get it into Something covered like plastic or whatever in the fridge and let it sit there for up to a week. Even the sweet spot's probably around 36 to 72 hours. I showed in a video probably years ago now where I would make bread for the week. So you can 3x the recipe. If you have a large family and you want like six loaves of bread per week, get it all in the fridge and then the first one obviously will be baked the next day, so it won't be that sour. But then as the week goes on, you'll have more sour bread. Another thing that makes an influence on how sour the bread is is if you use whole grain flour. So the more whole grain flour you use, the more sour the bread tends to be. So if you're trying to not make it sour, using less bran and germ and, you know, whatever's in the whole grain and more all purpose would be what you'd want to do if you want it to taste more sour. The more whole grain you use, the more sour it will be. Another option for having a long rise is to put the starter in after it's reached its peak. So a lot of recipes call for fed sourdough starter, active and bubbly starter. That's where if you were watching your starter and how it rises in the jar, where it gets to the peak before it falls back down again and loses all that air would be where you would normally feed it. But if you want it more sour, when you feed it after that peak, it's going to have to rise longer. And anytime you rise longer is when you're going to have a more sour product. For me, personal, I don't pay attention to a lot of this. I don't really worry about whether I fed my starter or I haven't. I just work with what I currently have when we want something sourdough and sometimes it's more sour and sometimes it's less sour. But if you do want to dial in the flavor profile, those are a few things to remember. For less sour, of course, skipping the cold ferment altogether. I do this sometimes just because I'm in a hurry. So if you do all all purpose and you put it in a semi warm place for the bulk ferment and the second rise, and all within the same day you bake your sourdough bread, that's going to be a less sour final product. So I do have a recipe over on farmhousemboon.com where I show you how to make same day sourdough bread. Following a lot of the principles in that you will end up with a less sour final product. Another tip for making it ferment faster is to add more starter. Again, if it ferments faster and it's not sitting there doing the slow sour development of flavor, it's gonna be less sour. So adding more starter can help with that as well. As far as the sweet recipes, just fermenting it less for less time can be really helpful. The thing about recipes that are sweet is usually they include a fat like butter or oil and a sweetener like sugar or honey. This means that it can stand. Usually fat will make it to where it won't over ferment. And get that like if you let your sourdough boule that's made only of flour, water and salt, if you let that over ferment, it becomes unworkable where, where you had a nice workable gluten structure before it turns into a sloppy mess. That does not really tend to happen whenever you add a fat to the dough. I find like I can let my sourdough cinnamon rolls or brioche dough sit for really long amounts of time before it loses its structure and over ferments. Because of that, it can sit out. And so therefore, if you let it sit out a lot longer, you are going to have a more sour final product. So just pulling it from that faster, like if you're doing cinnamon rolls, you're not really looking for a rise. In that case, you're more just trying to give some of the sourdough flavor and you're also trying to make the grains more healthy for your digestion. So in that case, just pull it at eight hours and either put it in the fridge or bake it right away and completely pause that process so that it's not getting more sour. Things like brioche, I like to do a nice long rice for that, but pulling it at half the time is going to help. So any way that you can make it rise faster, like a warm spot, more starter and less of a fridge rise. So bake it more quickly. Maybe just skip the fridge altogether. Like in the brioche, you can do the first rise. You can divide shape and then do a room temperature rise for only an hour or two. That will give you a less sour final product. So does the flour you use change the taste of the sourdough? It for sure does. You can feed your starter with any kind of flour and you can make bread with just about any kind of flour, but it will change the final product. I find all of that Experimentation in my kitchen, really fun. But I have a lot of eaters, so we're really. Nothing's going to go to waste. Even if it's sort of a fail. I can turn it into croutons, breadcrumbs. I can do sourdough French toast. So I'm always okay with just kind of letting it turn out, how it turns out. But again, some people really do like to dial in the flavor. And if you don't have a large family, like, you might actually have attempts that could be wasteful if you don't really like the final product. So that makes sense. Okay, storage. How do you store your bread to keep it from going stale? So the funny thing about this, I'm currently in the process. Actually, I'm finally done, but I don't have it yet. I'm in the process of writing a sourdough book. And with book writing, you really have to find the information that is technically right. So kind of what everybody agrees is what is right. Because if you. You don't, you're gonna have people who say, that's not right. And so here's the thing. It is technically right to put your bread in something that's not airtight. Something like a bread bag, a bread box. These are things that still provide some airflow. And the idea is that your bread isn't gonna go moldy because the moisture is trapped inside. That being said, so I did not put this in my book, even though I wanted to, and then I got correct. Anyways, I don't want to give information that is technically wrong because I don't know, it's a really weird, strange thing. But I do want to tell you that I keep my bread in Ziploc bags, so you're not supposed to, because it will mold. Theoretically, I guess this could again, just come back to my large family thing in that we don't keep bread for weeks at a time. But my biggest problem with bread is actually not it molding, it is it going stale. So for me, I do airtight, which is exactly what if you were to, you know, Google and look at Reddit forums and figure out, like, what's the right answer? It is to not do that. For me, personally, if I put it in a bread bag or I put it in a bread box, I find that it goes really stale. It's fine, because we'll toast it and put butter on it again. We have all of those things, breadcrumbs, we love. Like, we always have breadcrumbs in this home, to the point where the other day I was making meals for a couple families in our church who just had babies, and my plan was meatloaf. So I set out my meat. I, you know, got the potatoes, whatever, everything all ready, and then I realized we don't have breadcrumbs. It's so rare that we don't have breadcrumbs that I just took for granted that we have them because we always have them. So anytime bread goes a little bit stale or it's just a little bit past its prime, I cut it up, toast it in the oven, and blend it. So I was able to, that day, like, still make them because we had a little bit of bread left that could be made into breadcrumbs. But it's okay in our family for us to, you know, not have perfectly good bread because we can always use it for something else. But for me, if I want to reuse it as bread, like sandwich bread, it has to go in a Ziploc or. Or it will get really stale. So I don't know. Comment down below if you're on YouTube. I know a lot of you are listening on the podcast apps if that's how you do it. But technically, it's going to go moldy if you put it in something airtight where it can sweat. Now, one thing I will say is I don't put it into a Ziploc bag when it's still hot. Usually that first day and it's sitting out, we're eating from it. And then at some point, I realized, okay, we're not gonna finish this bread today. And then I slip it in a Ziploc bag so it's no longer hot, so it's not sweating, collecting a lot of moisture. Okay. My sourdough bread gets gooey the next day, so it needs to be heated up in order to eat it. That was under the storage questions as well. It sounds to me like you aren't baking your bread all the way through. And this is tricky because there are so many factors and nuances with sourdough. You have how active your starter is, how long have you had it, how often do you feed it? Some people's ovens run 5 or 10 degrees cooler or warmer. Maybe in your climate, it ferments really quick. There's just so much with sourdough that I try to give you more of a guide. Again with the book. Really hard, because I had to be very concrete with this is how you do it, because I'm writing it out. But whenever I'm trying to explain it and show it in videos. I do want to make it more intuitive to you because that is the truth behind sourdough. And if your bread is consistently getting gooey, it's definitely being, I would say under baked now, unless you mean on the outside. And that could be if you're slipping it into something airtight when it's still really hot and it's sweating. Possibly. But those would be the only solutions I could see because mine definitely does not get gooey like that. Do you have to refrigerate sourdough products after they are baked? You really don't. What I try to kind of think about is like, what ingredients are in it and would I refrigerate those ingredients? That's just the rule of thumb that I go by. So if I have cinnamon rolls with cream cheese topping on it, I'll refrigerate that. I mean, honestly, sometimes we just don't. But we take a lot of, I don't want to say chances in our home, but I know that I do things different from what, like the technical guidelines. And I get lots of people who say on YouTube, oh, you shouldn't do it that way, you shouldn't do it that way. And I'm like, we never got sick, so I'm just going to keep doing it my way. But I would think technically you should. If you're uncomfortable with like one of the ingredients not being out, then maybe put it in the fridge. It also depends on how long it's going to be before you're going to consume it. So if we made bread, say we made bread Wednesday and by about Thursday afternoon, I'm looking at the weekend ahead. Friday, Saturday, Sunday, I'm like, oh, we're not going to be, you know, eating bread this day or that day or whatever. If you can, like see that. I would then slip it into a Ziploc and put it in the fridge. Just because I would think, oh, maybe this is going to go moldy by the time we actually get to it. But usually bread, I mean, I would also leave it out on the counter for quite a while. So it really just depends. Like a loaf of bread at the store, it has things that make it shelf stable and so you could end up with some mold because you're not putting those things in your bread if you aren't refrigerating it and it's getting some moisture inside. So if you feel like you're not going to touch it for the weekend, head, I'd probably slip it in the fridge. Monday morning, I'D probably turn it into breadcrumbs or croutons. But if over the course of two or three days we're going to eat it, I'm just going to be leaving it out, probably in a Ziploc, as long as it's not getting some moisture inside. Okay, refrigerating how to prepare sourdough recipes in advance what is the best time to pause the process by putting it in the fridge or freezer? So for me, my favorite time to do that is after the bulk ferment. So I've shown many times over on YouTube a sample what I would do if I was doing like a bulk prep day where I'll prepare four pizza dough crusts, some cinnamon roll dough, some brioche dough. You know, I'll do several at one time, get the mixer dirty ones, get my bowls dirty once, get out the flour, salt, honey, butter, you know, the basic ingredients that you're going to be using for almost all sourdough recipes, get them at once, prepare a whole bunch. What I will do then is I will let them all ferment in separate bowls and label them at room temperature till they've done that bulk rise, usually about eight hours. Again, it depends on the time of year, it depends on what kind of dough it is. All of those that I just mentioned are a nice enriched with butter or oil or you know, they have other things in them that kind of make it to where they don't over ferment very quickly. So, you know, say I get that all done around 4 in the afternoon. It's really hot in my house. I'll probably leave it out till bedtime and then pop all those bowls in the fridge around like 10pm if it's winter and it's 4 o', clock, I'll probably put them in the pantry, let them sit in the pantry all the way until the next morning and then pop them in the fridge and then throughout the week pull them, divide, shape, rise, whatever the next part of that process is. Now you can do it at different stages. Like for example, cinnamon rolls. I would be comfortable with, you know, filling them, rolling them, cutting them, covering them, and putting them in the fridge for a day or two before baking. If you want to get like really far in the process. If you want to make this something that you can make within like an hour's time the next day, you know, if you're really wanting to prepare ahead, say you have a brunch and it's going to be or breakfast at 8:00am and you know, you don't want to wake up the next morning, take it out of the fridge, you know, roll it out, do all that stuff, and then let it rise. It's going to be too much. I could see shaping it and doing all of that, putting it in the fridge, cover it with foil, and then baking it. So some things can totally be at other times, but that is just what works best in my routine, is to let them all do their bulk ferment and then put them in the fridge and then pull them out on the day that I need them to shape, rise, and bake. How do you manage to leave your dough in the fridge to be used throughout the week without it continuing to rise? I've tried to save half a batch of pizza dough for later in the week, but it always bust out of the wrapping and I'm forced to bake it within a day. So mine does rise very slowly in the fridge, but not that fast. Maybe put it in something larger. I've definitely kept pizza dough in my fridge for many days, but I have it. I use a lot of gallon Ziplocs, which I know is very not crunchy of me, but they're just so handy in my kitchen. And we do reuse them a lot, too. So certain things like we'll keep freezer bags of bananas, and when the bananas are done, I'll just stash that bag back in the freezer, knowing that I knew it was bananas so I could put bananas in again. We do try to reuse them a lot, but they're really darn handy because with one pizza dough recipe. So if you take one recipe, divide it in four, and put each one. If you were to put each one in a Ziploc, I don't think would fill that up. They haven't for me. But again, a lot of times I'll keep it in the bowl until I'm ready to do it. And then our family can eat four pizzas, so we can actually eat all of that dough. But I know I've kept it in there, too, in a Ziploc. And then like pie dough, we've kept it in there for so long that you smell it. Not. Not so long, but like a week. You smell it. You're like, that smells really sour. But you know, it's good because the action that. That those. Those good bacteria are taking on that flour is a good process. So it's good. It just can get more sour. But, yeah, I would say maybe try to put it in something larger. I would think that would work fine. Okay. Should you stir down or avoid stirring down your active starter for a recipe? See, this to me, is one of those details, and I don't mean to, like, dismiss your question, but I just, I hope that by how I answer this question, I'm giving you some confidence that it doesn't have to be so complicated. Honestly, you can put a quarter cup of starter, a half a cup of starter, or a cup of starter likely in a recipe, and it'll all work out just the same. So if your starter is really bubbly, you dip that cup measure straight into that jar, it's going to deflate it some. That's going to be just fine. Now, of course, if you're going for gram measurements, then you know it's going to. The weight is what's going to influence that. So that's why I think a lot of people really like gram measurements, is it's. You don't have to worry about questions like this because you're going to get the accurate amount subtracting for the air, whereas when you're doing a volume measurement, you're having air in there. And so some people really like specifics. And it kind of this kind of thing, like really, you know, you start thinking, wait a minute, if there's air in there, it's not really a half cup. Basically, what I try to tell people to do is think about what it is. You're essentially just, instead of doing powdered yeast, you are just doing natural yeast. So as long as you have yeast to leaven the whole lump, as the Bible says, you know, it will eventually work through it all. Now, more starter is going to make it ferment faster, less starter is going to make it ferment a little slower. But then again, so is 4 degrees of difference in your house. So if I keep my house at 78 and you keep your house at 71. Unless we understand what's happening here with the sourdough, it's going to be really difficult to give specific instructions. So with all that said, don't worry about that. It's okay. You don't need to worry about whether you stir it down or whether you. You don't. It's going to be fine, especially if you know what you're looking for, you know, all the cues of sourdough baking, which you'll get really more familiar with over time. Okay, how do I get my starter through the first week? It keeps dying on day four, it bubbles and rises throughout day three, but everything stops at day four and I can't revive it. So I say just keep going. Because usually what happens with a starter is right out of the gate, it just looks like, wow, this is working. Everything's multiplying. And then sometime around day four, when everything's trying to kind of regulate, it doesn't have that same result, but you just keep staying the course, keep feeding, keep discarding when you're first starting, and it will come out of it. So I wouldn't just assume because it's not bubbling on day four that it isn't working. It's just trying to regulate and just staying on. The process will eventually get there. Okay, how to tell if my sourdough starter is too liquidy? Again, there's really no such thing as too liquidy. Either way, you are creating a colony of yeast that is going to make your baked good rise and get fluffy. And those yeasts are in there. Whether or not there's a lot of water or a little water, you can keep a really stiff starter. You can keep a more liquidy starter. That, again, is not a detail that matters. And I hope that again, I'm just giving you freedom to understand that that's not that something to worry about as opposed to being like, don't worry about that. But I do that. It's just one of those things that sometimes, and I get people, this is the thing, I get people that constantly comment like, oh, no, your starter looks so much more liquidy than mine, or, oh, no, my starter looks more liquidy than yours. And that's just what they saw that day. Sometimes my starters were liquidy, sometimes it's like stiff. You can hardly get the spoon through it. And it just depends on who fed it. So when my daughter feeds it, one of my daughters, she always puts too much water in, so it's always like so liquidy. And then when I say too much again, it's totally fine. You add it to the bread and it all, it all works out because there's yeast in there regardless. And then sometimes, you know, I'll add too much flour and I'm just too busy to go back and add more water. And so it's stiff. It's really all just a preference thing. And it totally doesn't make any difference to your recipe. Now, of course, this is if you're not a super precise baker like me, sometimes the dough, you know, it's a little bit more liquidy, but as it does its autolyse or autolyse, and as you do your stretch and folds, it comes together and all of that liquid gets absorbed by the grains and it's all good. You've said before you make sourdough simple without perfectly timing when to feed sourdough, etc. That said, do you pay attention to hydration levels, exact measurements of flour and water when you feed and things like that? Never at all. No. We just dump flour and water in and my kids do it too. Now I have a very established starter. It's been around for as long as my second child, so 13 years. But any starter, once it's past a certain maturity level, probably like three months, honestly doesn't have to be 13, can handle a little abuse. They're way more resilient than people think. Once that colony in there, the bacteria, the yeast are fully established, it really can handle what you do to it. As long as you're feeding it, you're not just neglecting, can do that. So the other day we had our starter down to like, I don't know, you can't see me if you're listening to this on the podcast apps, but say an inch, half an inch level, just tiny little bit. And my daughter just kept adding more and more flour, more and more water, and I'm like, oh my goodness. The jar was basically filled up with starter, but those yeast that were down there in that little bit just kind of took the whole thing over and it was all good. And we just had, you know, about a half gallon of starter after that to make pizzas and pancakes and waffles. How to maintain a starter when traveling or moving a long distance without having to start over. So a few things, you can freeze it, you can dry it out. I honestly don't ever do this. My biggest tip is to one, give it to a friend. So if you have a well established starter and you know, you find somebody in your community who also wants to do sourdough, say, hey, anybody want a starter? Anybody want to start making bread? Trust me, right now, sourdough is at scale. Everybody knows about sourdough. Even your, you know, people you thought would never care about sourdough at this time do. And so everybody's kind of looking for a starter. So find people in your real life who have been wanting to start it, but maybe were intimidated by the start of process and give your starter out so that it lives in multiple places. That's one of my favorite tips. So from, like, I don't know, three years in on my starter, my other, my sister got married and she started running a household and so I gave her some starter. She's had that ever since. I Gave some to my mom, I gave some to my other sister and my other sister and then so many other people over the years that I'm like, if something happened to my starter, I could just go ask one of those people for a cup of starter. And I have my starter yet again. Another thing is starters can really take a lot. So I've had, you know, we moved with my sourdough starter in 2019 and it sat in a horse trailer. It was January, so it was really cold, but it sat somewhere in this horse trailer that had all of our stuff while we were getting our floors refinished and the house painted and all this stuff. And. And it totally survived. So if you keep it in a cool place when you're ready to start working with it again, it might take a few feedings to get it really woken back up. But it really is quite resilient as long as those yeast stay alive in there, which they can stay alive for quite a while. Cool. Storage is good, but yeah, get somebody else doing it too. Somebody asks, how do I know if my starter in the fridge for months unfed is too far gone? The way to know is to take a little bit of that starter out, add it to a fresh bowl, add a little bit of flour and water, and if in about six to eight hours, it's bubbly, it's good. If you see no activity, you smell it. It's just smells like flour and water. Probably every yeast in there was dead. And so you just kind of. You feed the yeast and see if they start eating and if they don't, they're probably dead. Okay, should I discard my starter? If on the third day there's brownish liquid on top, there's no growth? Absolutely not. That's called hooch. That just means you need to feed it more. It probably is warm in your house. It ate through the flour, you gave it really fast and it needs more. What to do when your starter looks smells healthy but the dough won't rise? Oh, man. So that could be a lot of things. It could just be that it needs to rise longer. It's hard to say without actually seeing where, like what it looks like and throughout the whole process for you. But if it doesn't rise ever, I would question the health of the starter. I'd probably do some more feedings, more time before attempting bread. Should I let my starter come back to room temperature after taking it out of the fridge before using it? So you definitely do not have to. I make things all the time with starter straight from the fridge, even things that need to rise, not just discard recipes. And the thing that happens is it takes longer for it to get through those rises. So it takes longer for it to get through the bulk ferment and the second rise. But that will develop a more sourdough flavor because your starter's less active. It's taking it longer to wake up and to feed on the flour in the recipe. So if you are trying to do a more sour flavor, and usually for me, I'm not trying to do a more sourdough flavor, I'm just like, oh, I need to make bread and the starter's in the fridge. And so I just move on with the process. And it does actually work. All right, a few questions about gluten free sourdough. I do want to say I just don't feel like I have the best experience with this. Now. I do have a recipe over on the blog. I had a family that is gluten free, helped me to develop it, but I personally don't have a ton of experience with it. I do know that regular sourdough obviously reduces the impact of gluten when people are sensitive. But for those who are celiac, strictly gluten free, you can do sourdough. Some of the more like discard recipes, like pancakes, waffles, I've had more success with that as opposed to the gluten free sourdough bread. Again, it's possible, but somebody says, is it, is it realistic or is it worth it? I don't know that it is. Honestly. I just don't know that it technically is. It just, it's just not the same thing. So I would probably stick to, you know, just other things that are naturally gluten free. Again, the discard recipes are great. They're easy. I would go more that direction. Okay, the next group of questions, I'll probably answer these and then save all the rest of these for the next Q and A because I'm gonna get through. About half of these is on fitting sourdough into your schedule. So someone asks, how much time a day slash week do you spend on sourdough? I don't know. That would be hard to figure out because it's such an on the fly thing. It's not like a, you know, I'm making sourdough today, I'm gonna stay home all day and make sourdough. It's kind of like a mix the dough here, a stretch and fold here. 20 minutes later, maybe a stretch and fold here. I find that it fits Very nicely into my schedule. The key with fitting sourdough into your schedule is getting a few recipes, maybe a handful, maybe like a couple of breakfast recipes, one bread recipe, maybe one dessert recipe that you nail down. Like, it is so easy for you. You could do it in your sleep. You don't have to get out a recipe book. You don't have to pull out your phone to figure out what it is. Those are all very fun. But if you feel like you can't fit it into your life, like, there's no way. I'm way too busy for sourdough. It's really just because you don't know what you're doing. Because if you did, it wouldn't be overwhelming, because it's really just mentally overwhelming. It's not actually time consuming. So for me, I have my favorite recipe that I make over and over and over again. Sometimes I like to make sourdough buns, make sourdough brioche, make cinnamon rolls. Those are all very fun. They're very special. It's when I have a little time in the kitchen or if I'm doing like a bulk prep day, that's great. But on a daily basis, on the fly, I just make the same thing over and over again because it's as easy as making anything else. Like, you make your kids oatmeal. You dump oatmeal in some raisins, some water. You don't have to measure it. You just dump it all in. That's easy because you know exactly what you're doing. Sourdough is just as easy if you know what you're doing. And the way to do that is to master one thing before you move on to anything else and make sure that thing as intuitive and as easy as making oatmeal or coffee, something that you don't hear. People say, I don't have time to make oatmeal. Like, that's just not something you hear. But sourdough, it's the learning curve that makes people say, I don't have time for it. Because it's not actually more time consuming. It truly isn't. I mean, it's something that you can do very seamlessly throughout your day and your schedule. If it's not a thought, that's having to go into it. Okay, how often do you bake with sourdough during the week? And how often to feed the starter if it is sitting out? So if your starter is sitting out all the time, you have to feed it every single day, which can be really overwhelming. Even For a large family like us, we don't leave the sourdough out at all times. We definitely go through times where we use sourdough way more often than others. I would say in the wintertime, we use sourdough way more often than we do right now. Now I am baking. Probably twice a week I'm baking bread. But I'm. Right now, currently I'm out of the habit of making waffles and pancakes. Sometimes that's just like what's currently on the rotation. And I make them every single day. But I get in these grooves with things where I have something that I'm making all the time, and that's just what I'm doing. And right now it's oatmeal with eggs in it. That's been my go to for so long. For a while it was puff pancakes, and then for a long while it was sourdough pancakes and waffles. So it really depends, like, if we have a ton of eggs from the chickens, I'm trying to do things that make more eggs, and I just get in these grooves and these habits. So there are times in my life where we're feeding sourdough every single day, using it all the time. Then there's times when I'm only just using it mostly for bread. I would say right now we have so many plans outside of the home. Like, we're going to the pool with friends or going berry picking or meeting up at the park or the splash pad. There's just a lot, like, we were at the fair, a whole bunch in these last couple weeks at the time of recording, because it was fair season. So this time of year there's just a lot going on. And so I'm not. I would say I'm not like, baking every single day. And so it really ebbs and flows. I have a video over on YouTube where I did a week in the Life of my sourdough starter where I showed how I practically use my starter when it comes out of the fridge when I feed it. And that was just like in that moment in time, whenever that video was a couple years ago, how I was using it. If I did that same video right now, it'd be a little different. If I do it six months from now, it'll be a little different. I just get in these habits in my kitchen where I get stuck on, you know, I'm making this now, and this is what we're just always getting. Or maybe we have a lot of stuff coming from the garden. So we're Always making pizza or whatever. Like there's always something that changes the situation, whether it's time or whether it's what's available that makes that question, like, answer very differently. I'd say right now I'm probably getting it out of the fridge and feeding it twice a week, but there's been times where it's all the time. Could I batch prepare doughs and bake them through the week, including sourdough, pie crust and pizza dough? Yes. I have videos on this. I do this all the time. So check my. If you go over to YouTube.com farmhouse on Boone, check the video called, I believe it's called Don't Meal Plan. That's a video that, depending on when you're listening to this, I did in, I want to say July, it says three weeks ago here where I show that. Like I show how I would do a sourdough prep day. And then I also have other videos throughout in all my vlogs where I do that. But yes, absolutely, I kind of talked about that earlier in this episode where you get all the doughs going, let it do its bulk ferment, put it in the fridge and then bake throughout the week. 100% you can do that. And if you have some time on maybe a Sunday afternoon or a Monday afternoon, that's a really great day to do that. And pizza dough and pie crust are perfect for that. We are empty nesters and only need to make bread about once a week. How do you do sourdough in a small way without wasting ingredients? So you can actually make smaller loaves. On farmhouseonboone.com I have a recipe for small batch sourdough. So that's one thing you could do. If you're more concerned about the starter and feeding it, but then not using much starter, you can just keep the tiniest amount. So I keep a half gallon jar because I like to pull from it to make things like pancakes and waffles and crepes. But if you're only going to just use this as your yeast to bake bread, just take a little pint jar, half pint jar, put a tiny bit of starter in there and then each week just feed that little bit the amount that you're going to need for your bread. Say your bread needs about a half a cup of starter or a cup of starter, feed it that amount, take that cup out and then put it back away with that much starter in it. Again, you can keep as much starter or as little starter as you need. I get people all the time. Say, I don't want to do starter because I don't want to waste. You do not have to waste. I discarded when I first started my starter 13 years ago and never since then. You do not have to discard. There. There's ways to do it. You can just keep really small amounts. You can keep really large amounts. The more yeast you keep, the more yeast you have to feed. It's like chickens. If you have 50 chickens, you have to feed 50 chickens or they're gonna be hungry. You can't give them all a cup of, you know, food. You have to give them 50 cups of food. Same thing goes with sourdough. If you have this much, you have that many yeast guys. If you have a half gallon jar full, well, then you've got a lot of yeast guys to take care of, which for a large family, that's great because I have a lot of eaters. For a small family, just keep a small amount of starter and then you only have to feed a small amount of starter. All right, well, I hope this was interesting for you. Entertaining, probably not, but educational. Next time on my next solo episode, the other categories I'm going to cover. We have questions under recipes, under General Advice, under proofing and timing, under flour and under troubleshooting. So I will answer them all the best I can. It's funny because I've been doing this for 13 years. I've been doing sourdough, and I feel still like I'm not an expert. I think because of the way I do sourdough and the way I see other people doing sourdough on blogs and very official YouTube channels and all of this. I sometimes feel like I don't know what I'm doing, but I think a lot of you could really use that kind of advice. Just the practical ways of getting sourdough into your family's diet and life without it having to be perfect, without it having to be official and carefully weighed, it definitely can be done on very intuitively with a flow. And that is what I try to educate and teach people here. So if you find that interesting, of course, go ahead and subscribe or follow, depending on where you're at. Leave a review for the Simple Farmhouse Life podcast. Go over to my YouTube channel. I show all of this in video form in a practical way of how it's really implemented into our lives, not just theoretically, if you want to see it. All right, thank you so much for listening and I will see you in the next episode of the Simple Farmhouse Life podcast.