Raising a wild starter from rye and water, keeping it alive on a small ration, and the numbers for a 750 g loaf that never touches the mother jar.
Why this page exists. Every formula over on Ancient Breads leans on Lev'blé, which is deactivated sourdough plus selected baker's yeast — flavour without the biology. This is the other route: a live culture you raise yourself, on the same grain bins, with the numbers worked out for a modern hearth loaf.
The one rule that makes it sustainable: the jar in the fridge never goes in the bread. It is seed stock. You spend a spoonful of it, grow that spoonful into what the loaf needs, and skim next week's mother off the top before the rest hits the mixing bowl.
The loaf
A hearth loaf loses about 13% of its weight to steam in the oven, so a 750 g finished loaf starts as roughly 860 g of dough. Drag the sliders to re-scale — percentages are on total flour, counting the flour inside the levain.
| Ingredient | Weight | Baker’s % |
|---|---|---|
| Flour — your Bise T80 / Blanche T65 blend, or bread flour | 435 g | 90% |
| Water — 80 °F / 27 °C | 315 g | 65% |
| Levain, ripe — 100% hydration, at peak | 100 g | 21% |
| Fine sea salt | 10 g | 2.1% |
| Total dough | 860 g | 75% hyd. |
Total flour 485 g · dough 860 g · baked ≈ 750 g · build 125 g of levain
Bulk 4–6 h at 74–78 °F with four sets of folds in the first two hours, shape, then either 1–2 h at room temperature or overnight in the fridge. Read the dough, not the clock — a levain keeps its own schedule.
The build
The trick to never running out is that the jar in the fridge is not what goes in the bread. It is seed stock. Each bake you spend a spoonful of it, grow that spoonful into what the loaf needs, and skim the new mother off the top before the rest goes into the dough.
10 g mother + 57 g flour + 57 g water = 124 g. Clean jar, room temperature, loose lid. Ready in 8–12 h at 70 °F, faster if warmer.
Domed, webbed with bubbles, just before it sinks back. Take 20 g off into the clean fridge jar. That is next week’s mother, and it never had to survive the mixing bowl.
The remaining ~100 g goes into the dough. A few grams cling to the jar; that is what the extra 4 g of build is for.
Keeping the mother between bakes
A 20 g mother in the fridge holds two to three weeks without attention. If you bake weekly you barely need to feed it at all — each build refreshes it. After a long sleep, give it two room-temperature feeds at 1:2:2 before you trust it to raise a loaf. Grey liquid on top is hooch, not death: pour it off and feed.
From scratch
Start on whole rye. It carries the most wild yeast and the most enzyme activity of anything in your grain bins, and freshly milled from your own berries it is about as fast a start as exists. Keep the jar at 75–80 °F — temperature, not technique, is what usually stalls a new starter.
Debra Wink’s pineapple juice method drops the pH to about 4.0 on day one. That single change suppresses Leuconostoc mesenteroides, the bacterium responsible for the day-two false rise and the day-three stall, so the yeast comes up on day 3–4 instead of day 7.
Reading it
Ignore the float test until the starter is established — it fails on perfectly good stiff or rye-heavy levains. The rubber band is the better instrument: mark the level at every feed and watch how long the doubling takes. Use it at peak or just past, never on the way down.
Reminders
Feeding a starter is not hard, it is just easy to forget on day four. These build a calendar file in your browser — nothing is uploaded and nothing is stored — which you open once on your phone to drop the feeds in with an alarm on each. Times are floating, so they follow whatever timezone you are standing in.
Every feed from day one to the first bake, each carrying that day’s actual instruction, plus a weekly nudge for the mother once it is established. Follows whichever schedule is selected above.
The build the night before at 9:30 pm, peak and skim at 8:00 am, then mix, folds, shape, preheat and bake — timed to come out of the oven around 4 pm.
On a phone
The file lands in Downloads or Files rather than opening straight into the calendar — tap it there and your phone will offer to add the events. The feeds are a guess at your kitchen, not a law: if the jar is running ahead or behind, move the events. Deleting the series is one long-press on any of them.
For your grain bins
Percentages are on total flour, levain flour included. Bake loss assumed at 13% for a free-standing hearth loaf; a tin loaf or a longer bake will run 1–3 points higher.
Back to Ancient Breads, or to the software at Luke Pezet. Corrections welcome — lpezet@gmail.com.