Wakelyns YQ Sourdough Starter

Make sourdough loaves like Wakelyns Bakery! 

We celebrated Sourdough September 2022 with Wakelyns Bakery, they - and we - want to see as many people as possible baking sourdough with 100% wholemeal flour. To help that happen we offered the Wakelyns YQ Starter with a recipe from and care instructions from the bakers. It proved such a hit and we got such fantastic reviews that we've carried on listing it.

It's a dry starter, incredibly easy to look after and intended for storage in a cupboard or on a shelf rather than in the fridge. Perfect for delivery by post. As well as the recipe, the following care notes (pdf) will be included with your starter, along with Wakelyns Bakery's recipe for a Sourdough Tin Loaf:

Maintaining your starter is simple and can fit into your everyday routine. There is little waste from this method. A few days before baking, feed it twice daily for maximum activity. Depending on the number of loaves you are making bulk the starter up gradually with each feed using this ratio: 3 parts flour to 1.5 parts water and 1 part starter. An active happy starter will bubble a little and smell slightly sour.

For baking on a regular basis:
Keep your starter in your kitchen or store cupboard, not fridge. Feed twice a day, as below. Fit these feeds into your morning and evening routines. If that’s too much, once a day is also fine.

• 30g wholegrain flour
• 15g water from the cold tap – when it’s cold, use slightly warmer water
• 10g starter

Mix all the ingredients together, roll into a ball and keep in a jar

For baking once a month or less:

Keep your starter in the fridge and feed it once a week with the above quantities. Take it out of the fridge three days before baking, feeding it twice a day as above.

Wakelyns Bakery make bread at Wakelyns Organic Agroforestry. Each week the bakery produces very small batches of wholegrain bread, just enough for us to offer a few of their sustaining loaves, which have a complex nutty flavour and keep beautifully, through our website. When they bake they multiply their starter, critical to the flavour and quality of their loaves, through September they'll be setting some aside for us each week.

*Add the Sourdough Starter to your basket and complete your order as usual. The starter is produced, packed and dispatched to order every Wednesday. Orders for Wednesday dispatch must be received by 8am on the Monday.