This week is reading break and I decided to visit home! My mum has been nagging me since I baked her a loaf of bread for Christmas time for me to bring her some of my sourdough starter. She wanted to start her own sourdough journey. This was going to be a bit tricky so, I decided the best way to transport would be to dehydrate my sourdough starter and rehydrate it once I was home.
To dehydrate my sourdough starter, I fed it and then waited for it to reach its peak, the video below does an excellent job of explaining what peak means and dives deeper into the sourdough starter cycle.
This youtube short is one that my mom shared with me when she asked me for sourdough starter and the TikTok is the method I used when rehydrating the sourdough starter. The dehydration process was overall smooth. However, I was skeptical when rehydrating it. After I initially fed the starter nothing, really happened. But I didn’t want to give up, I followed the video instructions and continued and it started to double (and sometimes triple) in size like it normally does! My mom got excited and made multiple jars of sourdough starter so she could give it away to others in the family 
@secondrisesourdough I got a lot of requests on my last video to show the rehydration process once you’ve dehydrated your sourdough starter. Here’s what I do to bring mine back to an active state. Day 1 – Mix 5 grams of dehydrated starter + 20 grams of room temp water. Let that sit until it’s fully dissolved (2-3 hours). After it’s completely dissolved, add 15 grams of flour and stir well. Leave on the counter for 24 hours. Day 2 – 24 hours later (you really want to make sure you give it time to make sure all food has been consumed). Your starter should start to smell vinegary. Without discarding anything, stir in 20 g of flour and 20g of room temp water. Mix well, indicate your starting line with a dry erase marker or elastic. Day 3 – You may or may not see any activity at this point, depending on how fresh and strong your dehydrated starter is. From day 3 on, you can start discarding and feeding. I like to move 15g into a clean jar, and then add 30g of flour and 30g of room temperature water and stir. Mark your jar to track the rise. Day 4 – If your starter is rising and peaking within 4-6 hours of feeding, you can go ahead and beef it up to make enough for a loaf. I took 25g of starter and fed it 50g of flour/water, giving me 125g of starter. If you’re not getting a good rise yet, continue discarding all but 15g and feeding it 30g of flour/water for another day or two until you get consistent rise/peak. Hope this helps! Save this for next time you want to bring your dehydrated starter back to life
#dehydratedstarter #sourdoughstarter #sourdoughtips #sourdoughera #sourdough
Then my mom and I decided we wanted to try making pizza dough since we have our own pizza oven! The only challenge, my mom had a recipe that she really likes. I mentioned to my mom the things we had been learning in class and discussed using artificial intelligence as a tool to support what we already know or things we already have, but need to change or adapt. She let me practice teaching her a learner about generative AI, she has used it but was uneducated about its use, ethics and tips. I started out by discussing the ethics of AI (like water use and how AI can have bias), then discussed different AI platforms, and ended with teaching her how to effectively ask AI questions.
We started by taking a picture of the recipe she had, and together we put it into Chat GPT: https://chatgpt.com/share/6997c521-dc64-8000-a207-511e47573be8
Below is a gallery of the pizza we made, it turned out really tasty, I liked it better than using yeast. It did make the dough a little bit weaker than when using commercial yeast, the dough ripped easily. Next time my mom and I think that more mixing in the kitchenaid is needed or follow up the mixing with stretch and folds.
Sourdough Pizza Photo Gallery
My family thought the recipe and sourdough mixing needed some tweaking, because of the pizza doughs lack of structure when making the pizza and taste. but overall it looked and tasted pretty good! It was a fun experiment to practice dehydrating my sourdough starter too, now if something happens to my starter I have a safety net that I can rely on if I need too!
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