Today I'm talking with Sarah at Sourdough for Beginners.

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00:00
You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters, and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free-to-use farm-to-table platform emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups, and help us grow a new food system. You can find them at homegrowncollective.org.

00:25
Today I'm talking with Sarah Frank at Sourdough for Beginners. Good morning, Sarah. How are you? I'm good. How are you? I'm good. Are you in Canada? I am. I'm just north of Toronto in what we call cottage country. Okay. What's the weather like in Canada this morning? It's a beautiful day. A little bit overcast. We live right next to the lake. You know, it's nice and warm. It should be warm enough for the kids to go swimming later.

00:53
Nice. It is overcast and not raining. It rained really hard here yesterday. Like we had inches of water in front of our garage yesterday. It's been crazy weather this year for sure. So every time we get a decent day, we're pretty excited about it. Yeah, us too. It's, it's been, uh, it's been a much better spring than last year. And that's all I'll say. Cause I've already talked about how terrible last year was. Where are you located? I'm in Minnesota. All right. So, um,

01:23
I'm going to do a little bit of an intro here because I actually have info to share. You are an administrator for the Sourdough for Beginners Facebook group, which is really a great group. I have been stalking it because I've been learning about sourdough. And you are also an author of a book called Sourdough for Beginners, the ultimate companion for sourdough bakers. And so I really wanted to have you come chat with me because

01:52
As we were saying when we talked before, I have been avoiding sourdough like the plague because I thought it was intimidating. I thought that I would kill it. and sourdough became such a trend during COVID that I was like, eh, I don't know if I really want to do an episode about sourdough because it's very, very, very talked about online. And then a friend gave me some sourdough starter.

02:20
And now I'm learning and I made my first loaf a couple of weekends ago and it was, it was good. It turned out like a bagel texture. So it was under proofed, I've been told, but it was a loaf of bread and it was yummy with cream cheese. So I feel like I had a success. So tell me about yourself and what you do. So, um, I have a lot of kids. I'm a mom of five, two, three of my own and two stepdaughters.

02:50
We're very busy. Our kids range in age from seven to 18. We were actually just at our oldest daughter's high school graduation last night. And grads? And we've always been pretty health focused. So we always are like learning about the food science that's out there and then it's sort of across our whole family. So we are always trying to eat well and you know, we go to the gym, our kids are all athletes.

03:17
daughter's going to be playing varsity sports in university. we, about a year and a half ago, started looking at the food that we were getting from the grocery store and learned that one of the most, you know, one of the biggest culprits to poor health related to food is the bread that you buy in the grocery store.

03:43
So just like everybody else, we set out on the journey to learn about sourdough. And my sourdough starter, you know, took a really long time to get started. And I was in the big sourdough groups on Facebook. And sometimes it's hard to get an answer when those groups are so big. But ultimately I ended up figuring out not only how to make sourdough, but how to make it, you know, within a busy life and with the very most basic

04:12
cheapest ingredients and with very few tools. So the issue that we were having at the time is we were having some, you know, financial challenges. And at one point I actually went to the grocery store and had to say, I can afford either bread or the cheapest all purpose flour that they have one or the other. we just kind of took the leap. you know, fast forward about

04:36
three or four months, I'm making sourdough just like everybody else on the planet. I'm posting it on my Facebook. My friends start reaching out and asking me about it. I start sharing my sourdough starter, much like what happened to you. And then I found myself getting sore thumbs, texting with my friends all the time, kind of walking them through what to do. So I started this group on Facebook, Sourdough for Beginners, and I've never had a Facebook group before, so I didn't put any thought into, you know, a public group or

05:06
private group or anything like that. I just started the group and started typing out step-by-step instructions on how to make sourdough. So then when my friends would take some sourdough starter from me or reach out and say that they had sourdough starter, I would just give them a link to this group. Well, the group went crazy.

05:27
Like I think in the first month there was 5,000 members and by the sixth month there was 250,000 members and by the first year we were well over a million. And I think the group's approaching 2 million members now. I haven't looked at it today. So it just, and that's all in the, in the sort of the, the span of 18 months or so, two years at max. So, you know, it just kind of evolved organically from there.

05:56
People were coming on asking questions. I found myself answering the same questions all the time. Really early in the process, a lady named Barb Froude, who's located in Alberta, joined the group and started helping me. So she was sort of our first moderator who came on and she's still our, what I call my chief moderator. She's in that group every day trying to get rid of the spam and get the literature and the information that we have.

06:25
set up for all the newbies who joined the group. I think we're getting sometimes like 10 to 20,000 new members per day. So the biggest struggle with the group is getting that information out there, right? So that sort of led into, okay, well, let's make a video on YouTube. So we made the beginner bread recipe video and it's just kind of evolved from there. It got to a point where

06:54
It became basically my full-time job to just, you know, and luckily with the internet, there's ways that you can take something that you're passionate about and that people are responding to, like they were with Sarado for beginners. And, you know, if you, if you focus on it, you can build it up so that you can give it more time because there's, there's obviously rewards that come back to you. Things like book sales and ad revenue and that sort of thing. Yeah, absolutely. Holy crap, Sarah, that's...

07:23
That is like an overnight success story for your group. That's unheard of.

07:31
It was, it was shocking. We've done some work in internet within our family. We've, you know, we spent some time talking about it within the family. We're fairly close-knit family. We've got family in Texas and Arizona and up here in Canada. And so as it was going, you know, I had a lot of encouragement from the family. I would wake up in the morning and there'd be a screenshot of my group from my aunt in Texas.

08:01
And she'd be like, Sarah, you're at 50,000. Like what's happening here? You know, it hasn't been without challenges. Obviously, you know, managing a group means that you're managing all personalities that are out there. But I've been lucky that this group of moderators, this core group of moderators who have joined, spend a lot of time within the admin group trying to talk about what we're going to focus on and what it comes down to for us is,

08:30
sourdough, sourdough only and specifically making sourdough easy. So you'll never find myself or any of the moderators within the group saying, you can't use bleach flour or you can't use plastic or you can't use metal or you have to do it this way. What the message we're trying to send is you could be in financial hardship just like Sarah was and not be able to afford any tools and use just, you know, $3.99 bleach all purpose flour.

09:00
and make this happen. And then you can learn so much over time that you can slowly collect all the things that you would want and get to the point where I'm at where I have, you know, I can grind my own grains. I'm buying wheat from a local farmer. You know, I'm making the healthiest of healthy bread, right? But I got started with nothing. And that's the message that we're trying to put out.

09:25
specifically with sourdough for beginners. There's some really excellent groups out there and amazing teachers. So sourdough geeks gives a really good overview of like the advanced ways of making sourdough and the best practices for making the best sourdough that you can. And then there's guys like Tom Kakuza who runs the sourdough journey. He can tell you about the science of sourdough and all of those things I think are part of the journey.

09:54
do sourdough, it's kind of up to you. Like what part of the journey do you want to enter in on? Yes, exactly. And I love that the premise of your group is that anybody can try this, do it with what they have, because I always say do what you can with what you have, where you are. And so, so I had said in our emails back and forth that I had some questions and my first question is, can you tell how you get a starter?

10:23
started. So that's the easiest part, but it seems to be the most intimidating. And I think people get really confused about it. So there's ways to go into all the math. But really, all you need is flour and water. You take equal parts flour and water. Our suggestion is that you start with very small amounts. The biggest confusion that comes in with starter is the word discard. And

10:53
The easiest way to explain that is that when you're building a sourdough starter, you're just, all you have is flour and water, right? It's not really good for anything. And there's a certain point within the building of the sourdough starter where it starts to ferment. And so it's at a certain phase within the fermentation process where it wouldn't taste very good. It isn't good. So while you're building your starter, you should be kind of throwing away

11:22
the waste every day. But once your starter is established, you never need to discard again. So that discard question is the biggest confusion. But really, all you do is, let's say, 50 grams if you've got a scale. And by the way, if you invest in nothing, I really recommend getting a scale only because it makes things so very much easier. But it's not necessary. You can use cups and everything else. One of the biggest American questions we get is, why is everything in grams when

11:52
you know, we're American and we operate in cups and ounces, but grams are just more, what's the word, accurate. You can get much smaller measurements with grams than you can with ounces. So 50 grams each of water and flour or half a cup of flour and a quarter cup of water. So if you're operating on cups, water weighs approximately twice as much as flour. It doesn't really need to be

12:20
a scientific experiment where everything's exact. You just mix the flour and water together and leave it sitting on the counter until tomorrow. And then every day thereafter, you bring that starter back to the initial amount that you started with. So you started with 50 grams of flour and 50 grams of water, which was 100 grams on the first day, right? Throw half of that away, bring yourself back.

12:48
to 50 grams. So now you have 50 grams of starter, 50 grams of water, and 50 grams of flour added in today. Right? So now you've got 150 grams total. On day three, throw away 100 grams, get yourself back to 50 grams and do that every day. And when you try to say it out loud, it sounds so confusing. And this is where people start to get caught up with the starter. Right? But really all you need to do

13:18
is keep giving that starter base new flour to eat through and water to help it do that process until it activates. If you're doing things properly, around days six or seven, the starter should start to double in size and it should do that every time you feed it. Does that sound crazy? Does that sound too confusing?

13:45
Well, not to me because I've done it. but back years ago when people were like, do you do sourdough? I was like, hell no. I don't do sourdough. I don't have time for that. It's a pain in the butt. hear I'm not doing it. And I was being very obstinate about it. I will, I will be very honest. I did not have time with four kids and I was doing other things. I just didn't have the want to do it. The real desire. But what I will say,

14:15
is when my friend brought me starter, I killed it. I didn't beat it for like four days and it just didn't look good and it didn't smell good. And I was like, I think I just need to start over with my own. And so I started mine from scratch and I have a scale. the first day when I set up my little mason jar with my, with my 50 grams of flour and my 50 grams of water, I was like, okay, slick. got it. And I let it sit overnight and then

14:44
the same time the next day, pulled off half, put in 50 more grams of flour, 50 more grams of water, and did that for six, seven days. And it started to do the thing. And I was like, oh my God, I did it. I was so proud of myself, Sarah, that I did it. You're one of those lucky first try people. Yeah. If it was one message I could get out to everybody who wanted to try sourdough.

15:12
It would be that sourdough is so popular right now, unless you like want to overcome the challenge of making your own starter, you could just really go on marketplace on Facebook and there's people willing to give it away or who want 10 bucks for it. Oh yeah. You know, like it's just so much easier to get that starter, but if you can get through the process. So on the YouTube channel that we have set up sourdough for beginners,

15:39
All of the videos there are specifically geared towards people who are just getting started and who have no idea what the heck is going on. Right. And what we've done is we've sorted it into playlists. So if you hit the sourdough for beginners YouTube channel right across the top, says playlist. The playlists are kind of in the order you would need to follow them. So you can just go to the starter playlist and right there it's like, here's a day by day. Follow me for seven days. And.

16:07
we'll make this starter together. And while each day is happening, all those little nuances that come up, all those questions that, you know, there's probably about 25 questions about sourdough that come up over and over and over in the group, right? And when you get to 2 million members, you've just seen them a lot and you know how to answer them. Well, in these videos, when I make them, I just stand there and talk to them. You know, this might happen or that might happen. You know, focus on this. These are the most common mistakes that we see, whatever it means.

16:39
And that is amazing because I didn't know about your podcast and not podcast, your, your, um, can't talk. Didn't know about your Facebook group when I started my sourdough starter. So if I had known, I had known about the videos that would have been really helpful. And now that I know, I probably will go watch them just because I can. Um, the other thing is that.

17:05
This is a really cool science experiment for your kids to be involved in because cooking is chemistry.

17:14
Right, my 10 year old stepdaughter like brags to people she's like, I know. She calls, I know the sourdough recipe off by heart, you know, and most of it she can do. Her arm's not quite strong enough for some of the initial mixing, but you know, with that supervision and um,

17:37
I put my kids' butts on the counter as soon as they could sit up, all of them. By the time my oldest daughter was 11, I could yell down the stairs, Lexi, make me cookies. I've just always included them and I think it's good for them. Like you said, it helps them with science, it helps them with math, it helps them with understanding nutrition, science and health and everything else.

18:06
So it's fantastic with kids. really is. of the most viral posts that we get in the group are people showing what their kids are doing with sourdough. Awesome. I love it. And sourdough is very messy and kids love getting their hands in mud. They're going to love getting their hands in sourdough. Oh yeah. I didn't realize how sticky that recipe for the shortcut.

18:36
um, bread loaf recipe is. I was like, Whoa, this is some sticky dough, man. Yeah. So, you know, usually if you've got sticky dough, um, one of two things has happened. Um, the first thing is that you've used a high hydration recipe, which we have what we call the beginner bread recipe, which is specifically on purpose, lower hydration.

19:04
And then we have like the level two recipe, which starts increasing that hydration. The lower your hydration is, the denser your bread is going to be, but the easier it is to manage. the higher your hydration is, the stickier your dough is going to be and the harder it is to manage. your probability of success as a beginner comes up quite a bit if you're working with a lower hydration. that's, that's sort of number one. Number two is, um, if you overproof your dough, it becomes very sticky.

19:34
And as a beginner, it's very hard to fix that later. And that's one of the most common frustration posts that we get is it's too sticky, I can't manage it. I followed the beginner bread recipe, but it's too sticky, I can't manage it. there's certain things that I and the moderators in my group feel strongly about, although we never try to really push our opinions on anyone. just say, we think this. And one of the things that we think is that

20:01
leaving your dough on the counter overnight is almost never a good idea. Yeah. Yeah. I don't have, I don't dare to leave my dough on the counter overnight because my dog would figure out a way to get it. And she's a little tiny dog, but she would figure out a way to get it because it probably smells good to her. If I was going to leave it overnight, I would put it in the refrigerator. but the recipe that I used, found online cause that's how I find everything these days.

20:30
And when I put all the ingredients together, it was very dry. And I was like, I think I screwed this up already. And when I read further in the recipe, it said that the dough would be very dry to start and to leave it with a towel over the bowl to rise for an hour because it would get wetter as it did its thing. And I was like, okay, I'm going to go with this because I don't know what I'm doing. Came back an hour later and it had become much

21:00
a much wetter dough. And I was like, I will be damned if it worked. This is so cool. So basically I'm highly entertained by the process and I haven't made another loaf since we were, we were busy with stuff and I've got my, my sourdough starters, two of them downstairs that are all ready to be turned into bread this weekend. And I am, I'm going to on Sunday, I'm going to make two loaves this time and I'm going to make sure that I actually let it rise long enough.

21:27
because last time I think I didn't let it rise quite long enough. my suggestion for you, once your dough is mixed up, if you can find clear straight sided containers, and by the way, in the beginner baking playlist on the YouTube channel, there's a video called Do This One Thing to Guarantee Bulk Proofing Success. I find that people who've made

21:56
yeast bread before struggle the most with sourdough at first. mean, usually they, catch up really quickly. But if you've made bread with yeast in the past, the way yeast bread rises is it rises like a ball, whatever shape it was when it started, it kind of continues to rise in that shape. The sourdough, what it does is it fills in all the spaces first. So one of the most common things that we see in sourdough is my

22:23
dough has been sitting here on the counter for 10 hours and it didn't rise. And the thing is that it did rise, but you've got it in a giant bowl that has very sloped sides. And so your dough has kind of spread sideways rather than up. Okay. So people end up overproofing their dough. So what we do is we find, and by the way, I didn't invent this. I learned this somewhere on the internet. I just started to teach it, right?

22:51
There's something called like the alico method where people do it with a very small container with a piece of their dough. But essentially what we're saying is if you get a container that fits your dough fairly tightly, so for a standard size loaf, that would be like a one and a half or two quart sort of Tupperware container with clear straight sides. And you get your dough into that and then you mark the height of it. Then as.

23:18
the day goes on, can see exactly how much it's risen because it's tied up against the sides of the dough. So the dough can only go upwards. Okay. And so when it, when you're looking for the rise, do you want it to double? It depends on, there's a lot of factors that would affect why you would let the dough rise more or less. In fact, Tom Cacusa from the sourdough journey has an excellent chart.

23:48
that circulates on the internet. Now that I said it, you'll find it. But essentially what he says is, you know, if it's this temperature in your house and your dough was this temperature at the beginning, then it needs to rise 35%, 65%, whatever. It's very scientific. And I'll admit I've never once ever done it that way. But usually to be on the safe side as a beginner, what I say

24:13
is try to stay very consistent and only change one thing at a time. Pick a place to start. If you're gonna use the clear straight sided container and you're gonna let it rise, I would say let it rise to about 75%. Okay. And see how that turns out. If it falls a little flat on you when you bake it, then maybe go for 50 or 65 % next time. If it's still not as airy as you want it to be, then maybe let it rise a little bit more.

24:40
Because that rise process, all that's happening is the dough is fermenting and creating carbon dioxide bubbles. So it's just a matter of how big those bubbles are. If the bubbles aren't big enough, then it's very dense bread, right? If the bubbles are too big, they become just like, you know, when you blow a bubble, right? The bigger it gets, the thinner the skin is, the more likely it is to pop, right? If your carbon dioxide bubbles get too big, then your bread isn't strong enough to hold its own weight.

25:09
before it springs in the oven. Yes, exactly. So really, this is all- Those questions are always funny because people are always like, what percentage? I'm like, I don't know, do it by eye. Yeah, I feel like a lot of sourdough baking is by eye and by feel. And I kind of love it. It's very zen. It's very relaxing once you get, once you become unafraid,

25:38
It's very relaxing because you're learning. Exactly. Exactly. The stretch and pull thing. When I read stretch and pull, was like, I don't know what that means. And I did see a video about it. And I was like, oh, you literally take the top part, stretch it and put it down on top. And then you turn the bowl and you do it again. Turn the bowl, do it again. Turn the bowl, do it again. That's a stretch and pull. And the first time was great.

26:06
The second time the dough was slightly stickier because it had done its thing and that was a little messy. The third stretch and pull was fine. Fourth stretch and pull was fine and that's all the recipe required. And I was like, this bread is going to be dense. It's going to be a break, but I'm going to do it anyway. And I did it and it was fine. And the reason I say all that is because if you don't start, you don't know. Yep. It's true. The best.

26:33
method for sourdough is the one that works best for you. And once you acknowledge that you have ways of doing things and you understand things a certain way and you're in a certain kind of environment, you've got humidity and you live in the Bahamas and it's very humid and you live in the desert, why would you expect your bread to be the same? Once you understand that the process that seems to work

27:02
best and most peacefully and most consistently for you is the best process, then you don't have to worry about all the things that are out there. We have kind of a list of what we call the essential processes that we think, and it's not necessarily that you have to do them, but we think that if you follow this set of essential processes, you have a much higher probability of success on your first few tries, if that makes sense.

27:32
And if you fail on the first or second try, just keep trying. Eventually you're going to get it. That's right. That's right. Or some people just give up and that's okay too, because you can go to any farmer's market now and get a beautiful loaf of sourdough from somebody who is, you know, supporting their family by making it for 10 or $12. So it's not like you can't enjoy sourdough. Some people just come in and we see that post in the group all the time. You guys are all amazing.

28:00
I've enjoyed this journey so much. I hate sourdough. I'm never making it again, but I love the way it tastes. So I'll be at my farmer's market every Saturday. Yeah. And if you're supporting your local bakers, that's a great thing to do too. Um, the other thing that I see a lot of is people are frustrated because they can't make the beautiful fancy loaves of sourdough bread yet.

28:27
Honestly, those are great. mean, if you are that, I don't know, entertained with making sourdough and doing all the fancy designs on the crust, have at it. All I want right now is to just make a good sandwich loaf. I'm good with that. Right. We call those the insta loaves. And, you know, there's some people who have artistic ability. You know what I mean? Like it's,

28:55
It's the same as saying, you know, I've never picked up a pen and drawn something in my life, but I'd love to be able to draw a beautiful portrait of my mother. You know what I mean? Like you have to acknowledge this artistic ability, but everybody can do some beautiful scoring. Um, there's a lot of tricks with scoring that actually can make the scoring process better and the bread itself better. Um, but it's one of those things where you kind of need to like master the basics first. So in our.

29:25
in our world, call it the essential processes, master the essential processes, understand that there's all these other cool processes out there that exist and that could potentially make your future bread better, right? Things like mixing your flour and water the night before and letting it ferment overnight before you add your starter, adding your starter and salt later, you know, doing these intricate score techniques, going to super high hydration, all of those things exist.

29:54
But if you just come back and master the basics first and get a recipe that you're really enjoying, then you only have to make tiny little adjustments all the time to get to that perfect loaf. And then once you're at the perfect loaf and you can do that every single time or most of the time, because by the way, I still mess up loaves every once in a while. Nine times out of 10, I already knew I messed it up before it goes in the oven, but I just bake it anyway.

30:22
You know, then once you get to that, then you can start exploring sort of those artistic things. And there are influencers out there who just do beautiful work and they do it slow enough so that you can kind of copy them, right? that's influencers are generally putting their stuff out to teach you how, but I mean, if you are going to copy them, make sure you give them credit, course, right? But especially with artistic stuff, stuff that's, you know, that they designed in their own mind.

30:51
But scoring is one of those things. we call it, we say that there's two kinds of scores. There's the functional score that you actually need to assist the bread in rising. And then there's aesthetic store scores, which you're just doing because you like it. The aesthetic scores are the ones that are the fancy one. Yeah. So you need to put a score in your bread for the science part of it. Right. So.

31:21
You've fed your starter, it's risen. You've mixed your dough. You were calling it dry earlier. used to shaggy loaf, right? You've stretched and fold it three or four times every 30 minutes. You've put it in a clear straight-sided container. You've let it rise to somewhere between 65 and a hundred percent. So somewhere between one and a half times to two times its size. And you you've dumped it out.

31:51
pre-shaped it, you've shaped it, maybe you've cold-proofed it overnight, maybe you're just gonna bake it straight away. The score that goes into the bread and the way you hold your lame or your razor is gonna kind of affect the way the bread looks. And again, those things come with practice and over time. But essentially you need a score line that goes from one end of the bread to the other that's about a half an inch deep.

32:19
And the reason for that is that when you let the dough rise and then you pre-shaped it and shaped it, you trapped all those carbon dioxide bubbles in there. And it's really funny on Facebook, whenever I do a live and I start demonstrating this with my hands, how the dough sort of starts out looking like kind of flat and round. And then in the oven, it springs. I start doing this sort of upward motion with my hands and then.

32:46
Facebook Live makes hearts happen and it's hilarious. People go nuts. putting this score line in is sort of alleviating some of the pressure on the bread so that it can do that spring. So what sourdough does is it goes in as this kind of bubbly ball and then it explodes from the inside out. And so that's how you get that belly, that line that everybody's, people call it an ear.

33:12
Right? It's this coveted thing that everybody wants to see on their own sourdough. And that score, that essential score, that functional score is what assists with that. And a little trick that you can use is once you put your bread in the oven, set a timer for seven or eight minutes and look at your bread. And if your bread looks like that score that you cut is fusing together, what it means is that your bread sort of a little bit too heavy, cut that score line again.

33:40
at seven or eight minutes, give it a second chance to explode outward in because that's oven rise is what is the determinant of a good sourdough loaf or not. But of course it's everything that leads up to that that determines whether or not that's gonna happen. Gosh, I could go on forever. You're gonna have to stop me and ask me your questions. I feel like sourdough bread baking is

34:10
all about anticipation. Right. So, um, the other thing is, is you were talking about the discard at the beginning and I keep seeing recipes for, for discard and somebody told me they make discard chocolate chip cookies and I was like, huh, okay. The recipe on my YouTube channel. They're so good. You'll never make chocolate chippies chip, chocolate chippies, chocolate chip cookies.

34:38
without sourdough starter again. Yeah, chocolate chippies work. I like that. I'm going start calling them chocolate chippy cookies. It'll be- Here's the thing. You should. You know what? It's just going to be a thing now for me forever. I'm just going to tell all the girls that's what they have to call it. Yeah. I think that'd be great. If my kids were still little, they would love that. They would giggle every time I said it. So I do have a question. Did you self-publish your book or did you do it through a publisher?

35:07
I just figured out how to use the software to build the book and self-published it on Amazon. Wow. You just started doing sourdough, what, two years ago? Yep. You're impressive. And then just lived and breathed it for about 18 months. And I got a lot of help. I'm an Indigenous woman.

35:37
And they're in Canada, sometimes there's good programs for us. So there was a program called First Nations Women's Entrepreneurs, and they had a program where they would assist with, you know, building up a business. So they helped me with getting the website built, getting all the resources put together to start getting the YouTube channel built, you know, all of that sort of like.

36:07
internet stuff. And like I said, my family does have a little bit of a background in the internet. So it wasn't, it wasn't like it was entirely new to me to work on sort of the, the teaching side of the internet and the teaching side of something, right? And then with that book, all it really is, is a compilation of all these recipes that I've come up with.

36:34
on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis to contribute to the group. Okay, awesome. You are a very talented woman, Sarah. Thank you. Wow. I just feel like a normal human, by the way. I just made sourdough and shared with my friends. That literally is what happened. But I certainly would never downplay, you know, if you'd want to do something like this, if you want to teach about something.

37:03
It's important that you're passionate about it that it's something that you really want to do all the time, right? Otherwise it starts to get old. And there is definitely a lot of work that goes into building up something like this. Yeah. When I started the podcast back in August of 23, for the first six months, the word podcast came out of my mouth more times than it had in my entire life.

37:30
I literally was like, cannot say the word podcast again for a week. I've got to stop doing this. And my husband was like, don't. And I said, why? And he said, because you're so excited about this. He said, this is the thing you're meant to do. Feel free to talk about it all you want. He said, I haven't seen you this excited in years about anything that is, that's work. And I was like, oh, okay. So I thought I was making you crazy. He said, no, he said, you're driving yourself crazy, but it's a good crazy.

38:00
That's fantastic. That's so I think I think I think sourdough is the same for you. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. It's just and you know, sometimes there's just opportunities that you can seize. And like you said, you know, your husband encouraged you to seize it. But sourdough has been a family affair around here. I tell you like my same thing with me. My spouse is there trying to hold the camera for me and trying to tell me, you know,

38:27
try this, try that. He's in some of my videos doing his funny stuff, you know, like it's been, you're lucky when you can, you're lucky when you can have all of those things kind of fall together. But even if you don't have all of those things, if you, you love it, then you you should, you should do it. Yes. And honestly, making a loaf of sourdough bread costs less than buying the sourdough, buying any kind of bread at the store. It really does.

38:56
It's the best, think the most fun part. So just going back to that book, like the way I got all these recipes and just because you mentioned your husband, every recipe I made was something that my family asked me to make. the first one, my husband was like, I saw that people are making cinnamon buns with sourdough starter in them. And that's like his favorite thing on the planet. So we just made them, right? And then we tweaked the recipe and

39:26
You know what I mean? Tried to make it the way we wanted it to be. then since you're in the group and you're operating the sourdough YouTube and everything, might as well share it with everybody. And over the two years, that's just kind of how it went. Cinnamon buns, dinner rolls, sandwich bread, you know. And on the YouTube channel, there's a playlist called Discard Recipes, even though it's not technically discard. That word discard is so confusing for people.

39:53
Well, feel like most of recipes you can use active starter. If you want. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like discard comes across as negative and maybe we should call it bonus bonus starter. That would be good. That would be good. The only time you really need to throw your starter away and you really should throw it away is just in that first six or seven days. And I, some people are very against waste and I completely understand that. But we're talking about like.

40:23
in total about a cup of flour. know, after that, so the, so the general rule with what we would call discard recipes or recipes that are everything other than sourdough bread is if the recipe needs to rise, then it needs to be either active starter or inactive starter with a little bit of yeast added. Right. So that's things like cinnamon buns.

40:52
dinner rolls, sandwich bread, know, anything that rises. If it doesn't need to rise, go ahead and use whatever starter you've got. Use your active starter, use your starter that's been sitting in your fridge for a week and hasn't been fed. It's a little less active, right? That's things like cookies and brownies and crackers. Crackers, yes. Yeah.

41:17
That's a funny thing. I've never once ever tried to make crackers. And I think that's like the most popular, um, sourdough discard recipe that there is, but it's just no one in our family eats them. But put me on some pizza dough and oh my gosh, we've made some pizza dough. We've got to try that. We have a pizza steel that you actually put in the oven and heat up. So we're going to try doing a sourdough pizza dough. Um, probably not this weekend, but next weekend we're going to try it see how turns out.

41:47
Um, well, Sarah, this was fabulous. we're wait, we're, we're 12 minutes over half an hour here because I try to get used to half an hour. Where can people find you? So at sourdough for beginners, just spell out the whole word and then it's for FOR on Facebook and YouTube. Um, when you go on Facebook and you want to find the page, um, we've got the blue check.

42:15
We're on Instagram and Tik Tok too, but much smaller followings. I, my daughter tells me I'm too old and I don't know how to use Instagram or Tik Tok properly, but it's at Sarah sourdough for beginners on Instagram and Tik Tok. But my recommendation is, know, just go to the YouTube channel. It's we've really organized it well. Okay. And tell me again, the YouTube channel handle at at sourdough for beginners. Okay. Cool.

42:42
Thank you so much for your time, Sarah. This was so fun. And honestly, I have been so not motivated to do sourdough. And as soon as my friend brought me that starter, was like, I am going to dive in. The name of our place is a tiny homestead. Sourdough bread is part of homesteading. I need to learn how to do this. So I'm thrilled that I got to talk to you today. It was great. Thank you for having me. I'm really honored.

43:11
and you know just keep doing it you're gonna really like it and it's so good for you it's good for the kids it's good for everything. It is and I'm excited to keep trying new things. As always people can find me at atinyhomesteadpodcast.com. Sarah I hope you have a great day. Thank you. Thank you. Bye.