Sourdough bread has probably been the trendiest food over the past year. Beginning your own sourdough can be a little intimidating. A potato sourdough, however, can appear even more so because it doesn’t act the same as regular sourdough. Reality is, both are quite resilient. With so many sourdough recipes available, I believe the world could use something slightly different. Potato sourdough creates a fantastic naturally occurring yeast and should be the new sourdough favorite. Here are my tips for creating a successful sourdough.
What’s Unique about Potato Sourdough?
Unlike regular sourdough, a simple, authentic potato sourdough starter only uses all-purpose flour and mashed potatoes (water and sugar, too). Thus, the process of making the yeast is a bit different because we don’t have the microorganisms from other whole grain flours to feed the yeast (like in typical sourdough starters) instead we have potato starch and plain flour.
Here’s a shout out to our New Zealand Maori friends for this idea! Check out my previous blog post or video for the Māori Potato Sourdough Starter and Bread recipe with some really cool history and culture.
Practice, Practice, Practice = Success!
After trial and error, I’ve come up with my 7 tips on making a successful potato sourdough starter AND bread that actually apply to regular sourdough. This blog post describes how to be successful and avoid my mistakes at different stages. With my tried-and-true tips from experience, you can make a great potato or regular sourdough bread.
7 Tips for Creating a Successful Sourdough
Category I: Making the Mother Sourdough
Tip 1– Heat Part 1: 
You’ve just made your sourdough starter. When you start a new sourdough, be sure to store it in a warm area. Sourdough activates and grows in temperatures between 75˚F and 82˚F (25˚C – 28˚C). If your house is too cold, like mine is during the winter, then this is what happens. The sourdough has not bubbled, thus is not activated.
The best place I have found to store my sourdough is in the oven with an incandescent oven light bulb on. An LED light bulb will not work, because it doesn’t produce enough heat. With the internal oven light on in an enclosed space with the oven door closed, you will have a constant temperature of around 80˚F (27˚C).
This is what happened to my sourdough after I left it in the oven with the light on.
Huge difference! If you do not provide a warm area for your sourdough, it will just become dormant; the natural yeast will not activate and grow. That’s why you can store sourdough in the fridge forever and only feed it once a week or so. Heat makes a difference!
Tip 2– Heart:
This refers to having care, patience, and time. When you’re beginning a new sourdough starter, allow the sourdough starter time to grow, regardless of the recipe’s suggested number of days. A recipe may read “begin the sourdough on day 1, feed on days 2-3, and make bread on day 4”. Don’t make the bread until the sourdough is bubbly and has risen some.
If not, continue to feed everyday discarding (or using it) every few days to keep the volume down while maintaining the amount of sourdough you need for your bread recipe. Once bubbly, then follow your bread recipe directions (or check out mine). A potato sourdough will not bubble or rise very much. So, fermentation is very short (only a couple of days).
Tip 3– Health:
A healthy sourdough starter is bubbly, risen, and for a potato sourdough may have a clear liquid formed on top. This clear liquid might turn a little pink or purple because of the potato, but that is normal. If you find you prefer a LESS sour sourdough, then drain off the top liquid layer. Once ready, the starter should be foamy and smell like sour cream or a little vinegary.
Tip 4– Hunger:
Feed daily your starter. For a potato starter like in the traditional New Zealand Potato Sourdough Bread recipe, you’ll add ~1 cup of lukewarm potato starch water, 1 tsp sugar, and 1-2 cups of flour as needed. You want each feed to be the consistency of pancake batter.
Discard enough dough down to the number of cups you need for your recipe every couple of days to keep your dough at a manageable growth. Regardless of the type of sourdough you’re making, you can use your discard to make pancakes, waffles, cookies, crackers, granola bars, etc. My tasty recipes are coming soon! There are many options for not wasting your discard, but you can also just throw it away or give it away to a friend (with a note on how to use it). 😊
Category 2: Preparing the Dough with Starter for Baking
Tip 5– Hydration:
A sticky sourdough is actually a good texture for baking. Developing gluten in kneading your sourdough is important; however, the key is not adding in too much flour during the knead. Try to tolerate the stickiness as you’re kneading because water prevents the dough from being too dense and helps it rise and expand during baking.
Category 3: Shaping and Designing the Loaves
Tip 6– Help:
We have to help our dough by controlling it. As sourdough bread bakes, it needs room for expansion. If you’ve ever made sourdough bread before, you have probably seen sections of your bread that appear to have “blown out” while baking.
Since the dough grows, it’s like water; it moves in the path of least resistance. Thus, wherever there’s a weak point in the dough, like a small crack, that’s where the dough will separate. If you want a pretty dough, then you need to control those weak areas. You can do this simply by creating the weak points in areas that are aesthetically pleasing to you. Cut ¼-inch slits into the dough where you want the expansion to occur, so as the dough grows, it will grow primarily in those created weak areas. Have fun with the slits and make shapes or designs of your choosing. Try some traditional Māori fern designs.
Category 4: Baking a Successful Dough
Tip 7– Heat Part 2:
This refers to the baking portion. A Dutch Oven is a key component to the dough rising IN the oven. Sourdough browns and forms a hard crust quickly, if baked on a cookie sheet. By baking in a heated Dutch Oven, the pot conducts heat evening preventing a hard crust from forming so quickly that the dough pushes itself out in any weak spots resulting in an odd, weird or unwanted shape bread.
The downside is that you may not reach the golden color you want for your bread. But you’ll have an aesthetically pleasing loaf. Notice that the loaf on the left was baked on a cookie sheet! Yes! I still produced a pretty loaf without blow outs. This bake was successful because I created a SMOOTH dough all around EXCEPT with the intentional cuts on top.
I truly hope these 7 tips for creating a successful sourdough starter has been helpful. I have made quite a few loaves using potato sourdough and some that were somewhat visibly questionable.😊 I’m confident in my tips based on my experience and hope they help you in producing a successful potato sourdough starter and bread from scratch on your very first try.
Check out my video on these 7 tips with additional visuals “7 Tips for a Successful Sourdough Starter & Bread“.
Interested in other homemade bread recipes? Check these out.
Homemade Hamburger, Hot Dog, and Hoagie Rolls
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this post, please share it. Check out my YouTube Channel as well to see videos of kitchen tips, blog bakes, and dishes.