With a couple ingredients, you can make your own gluten free sourdough starter at home.

We have been using our gluten free sourdough starter since February of 2020. With the season of COVID lockdown and our social calendar getting cleared, I was eager to learn all of the old fashioned skills I could during the lull in our schedule.

I do not believe I am an expert at this and quite honestly, there are probably other or even better ways to do this, but I wanted to share with you what I learned and how I created our starter.

What are the benefits of Sourdough?

Chances are if you have stumbled upon this post, you are seeking to learn about the world of sourdough. While I won’t go in to too much in depth detail, I think it is important to establish why sourdough starters are so important or popular.

Sourdough bread is made by the fermentation of dough using naturally occurring lactobacilli and yeast. Sometimes referred to as wild yeast. It is the process of using traditional leavening or biological evening instead of cultivated beaker’s yeast.

The process of traditional sourdough is done through fermentation of the grains and the process breaks down four gluten forming proteins. It is almost as if the grains become pre-digested, making it easier for your body to break down the grains during digestion.

Why a Gluten Free Sourdough Starter

The concept of a sourdough starter is that the fermentation process breaks down the gluten forming proteins. For some people who are wheat or gluten sensitive, this process is enough to allow them to enjoy standard wheat flours without a gluten sensitivity reaction.

However, in our home, my son seems to have a reaction to anything that has wheat flour in it. We discovered when he was an infant anytime he had wheat, he had a reaction on his bottom. This has continued to be the case as he has grown. Learning about fermented grains and how others have been able to tolerate wheat that has been fermented, we gave it a try. We gave him some traditionally fermented sourdough with organic wheat flour. The outcome was still a rash and he complained his belly hurt.

So, I will continue with the process and use of a gluten free sourdough starter and recipes in our home.

Types of Gluten Free Flour

You can use whatever gluten free flour you would like for this recipe. I have only made this recipe for a starter using brown rice flour and buckwheat flour. Brown rice flour is my favorite so far, but I think buckwheat is considered to be a little more affordable.

Other options would be Sorghum flour, Amaranth flour, Teff flour, or Tigernut flour. Like I said, I haven’t ever used these flours so I am not sure how it would turn out. But if you use and try these flours, let us know how it works out.

Sourdough Starter Common Questions

How to tell when the starter is ready?

You are looking for various sizes of bubbles in your sourdough starter. I like to make my starter in a glass mason jar, so I can easily see when there are bubbles forming in the sourdough starter. You are also looking for a rise in the starter. A happy sourdough starter is “active”, which means it is bubbling and potentially growing after it is fed. You are also looking for it to double in size, which is why we use a rubber band on the side of the jar in the recipe.

What do you do with your starter?

Like I said above, this is not something I am an expert in. Quite honestly, I haven’t used our starter to make bread, mainly because I have struggled to find a variety of gluten free flours to use. However, I use our starter almost daily to make pancakes, muffins, pizza or flatbread crust, and even english muffins. I love to keep our starter fed and on hand to make a variety of different recipes for our home.

Essentially the sourdough starter becomes your active form of yeast or leavening. Where most of us were raised or used to using those packets of quick yeast for baking items, this is the traditional yeast with more health benefits.

How to keep and maintain a starter?

I like to say that sourdough starters are resilient, but I know that statement alone doesn’t answer your question. This an answer that depends on how often you want to use your starter. If you are going to use your starter every day, you can keep it on the counter and feed it every 12-24 hours. This will ensure that your starter is nice and fed for use daily.

If using your starter every day does not work for you, but let’s say you want to use it weekly, then keep it in the fridge. Put the starter, covered in the refrigerator and pull it out to feed 12 hours before you are going to use it.

You will maintain the starter by feeding it equal ratios of flour and water. I typically keep 1 -2 cups of starter in my jar at a time because our recipes we use call for larger amounts of starter at a time. So, I would feed my starter 1-2 cups water and 1 – 2 cups flour to keep it active. If you keep a smaller amount, say 1/2 cup, then you would feed the starter 1/2 cup water and 1/2 cup flour.