From One Starter to Three: Rethinking How I Ferment

When I started baking sourdough, the lesson was simple: flour, water, time — grow a ferment. I kept one starter, fed it big, and used it to inoculate everything. I also made way too much of it — this was before discard was chic, before holey-crumb shots were an Instagram genre. I just tossed the excess. It worked. But working and understanding aren’t the same thing.

Now I run three ferments in my Brod&Taylor box: a biga acida for testing Italianesque-styled breads, a levain pâteux for extra sourness and character, and my standard 1:1:4 feed as the workhorse. Same dough, three cultures, three different loaves — it’s become my favorite way to actually see what each one is doing.

Do I still think about changing the 1:1:4? Sometimes. But time is the real constraint, not curiosity. I don’t have the hours to treat every bake like a lab. So I play the odds, trust what the dough tells me, and bake anyway.

So far, it’s been fruitful. Baking has enough variables to pull you into a whirlpool — I just try not to get sucked in.