Disclaimer: I am not a celiac. I’m not even a little gluten intolerant. I do bake sourdough bread though, and after making my sourdough starter and diving deep into the sourdough world, a family member asked me if I could make gluten free sourdough.
It was a daunting question. After spending so much time and effort creating a sourdough starter, which turned into even more effort learning how to actually bake a sourdough loaf, I wasn’t sure I was ready to take another deep dive. This effort would be for a beloved cousin who hadn’t had a piece of bread in over three years though. She’d tried all the available gluten free bread options at grocery stores and hadn’t found a bread worth eating, so she just avoided bread entirely. I couldn’t imagine that and so I started reading up on gluten free sourdough starters.
Luckily, I already had experience creating a wild yeast culture. I knew what to look for, the signs of fermentation, and so I went for it. About three weeks later, I was thrilled to tell my aunt that gluten free sourdough starter was possible and that her daughter might soon eat gluten free sourdough bread.
Gluten free sourdough breads from the starter I created
I’m sure there’s more than one way to arrive at a gluten free sourdough starter, but I’ll lay out for you exactly what I did. It took me about two-and-a-half weeks of feeding and discarding to grow a reliable starter that doubled (then tripled!) with each feeding. For about two weeks, I recommend you feed your developing starter with brown rice flour only, and then after the starter reliably doubles, you’ll switch to a 50:50 mix of brown rice flour and Breadtopia gluten free bread flour.
I arrived at my feeding mix because of shipping delays during the Covid-19 pandemic, but the blend worked so well, I stuck with it. On Day 15 or so, just as I began to see the signs of a reliable starter, I ran out of brown rice flour. My shipment of more brown rice flour was late. This was mid-pandemic and I was panicking. I’d spent two weeks on this starter and could not let it die. I had already ordered and received Breadtopia’s gluten free bread flour in preparation for making this long-awaited bread for my cousin. So, I took a chance and replaced the brown rice flour with the Breadtopia mix for a feed. It made my starter thicker and that worried me, but like magic, my starter more than tripled that night.
Lively gluten free sourdough starter
Until my brown rice flour was delivered, I continued feeding my starter the gluten free bread mix and the starter doubled (and sometimes tripled) within a few hours every time I fed it. The consistency was more like a soft paste than a liquid, but it grew and made the little pockets of air in the jar that indicated fermentation. It was so lively that once the brown rice flour arrived in the mail, I made the executive decision to feed it with an equal mix of brown rice flour and Breadtopia gluten free bread flour. And that is how I still feed my gluten free starter to this day.
Equipment
Clean wide-mouth glass jar and cover, loose lid or plastic wrap
Digital food scale
Fork for stirring
Spatula
Rubber band
Optional Mockmill 100
Ingredients
first two weeks
700g brown rice flour
700g filtered water
third week
175g brown rice flour
175g Breadtopia gluten free bread flour
350g filtered water
Conversions
10g = 1 Tbsp brown rice flour
10g = 1 Tbsp Breadtopia GF bread flour
15g = 1 Tbsp water
Day 1
Put 50 grams of brown rice flour in the jar and add 50 grams of filtered water. Stir, cover with plastic wrap or a lid that’s not screwed on, and let the jar sit on your counter for 24 hours.
Day 2
Using a scale, remove half (50g) of the starter from the jar. To the remaining 50 grams of starter, add 50 grams brown rice flour and 50 grams water. Stir, cover, and let it sit on your counter for 24 hours.
Days 3 and 4
Remove 100 grams of starter. To the remaining 50 grams of starter, add 50 grams brown rice flour and 50 grams water. Stir, cover, and let it sit on your counter for 24 hours. If your starter is less active than Days 1 and 2, simply stir the starter and let it sit for 12 hours longer before discarding and feeding again. This is okay.
Days 5 through 14*
Now you will feed your starter every 12 hours. Discard all but 25 grams of your starter and add 25 grams of brown rice flour and 25 grams of water. Stir, cover and let it sit on your counter. After 12 hours, repeat these instructions.
*You may find that your starter is ready to transition to different food or bake earlier than Day 14. Evaluate the activity in your jar each day. If the starter doubles within 4 to 8 hours of feeding for a couple of days in a row, then you have a viable starter. You can transition its food (see below) and begin baking with it. If you don’t see it doubling, don’t give up. Let it sit longer, until it seems to peak, and then feed again. It will grow.
Day 15 (approximately)
Once your starter is reliably doubling, switch to feeding it a 50:50 blend of brown rice flour and Breadtopia gluten free bread flour. This made my starter thrive.
Maintenance
I typically keep about 75 grams of starter going so I have enough to create what I need for my gluten free bread recipe. I keep the starter in the refrigerator, and I refresh it once a week even if I’m not baking that week. The feedings described below are all 1:1:1 which means I’m using the same weight of starter, flour, and water.
Refreshment for Baking
If your gluten free sourdough starter is already warm, and it’s doubling within 4 to 5 hours, simply build enough of it through feeding to reach the amount needed for the recipe.
If your sourdough starter has been refrigerated, plan to feed it at least twice before baking with it. Take your starter jar out of the refrigerator and let it warm up a bit.
Discard a portion of the starter if you have excess. Your goal is to end up with enough lively starter or “levain” for your dough, plus about 25 grams extra to feed and then refrigerate.
Feed the warmed-up starter in your jar and let it expand until it peaks and then begins to fall. If it doubles in less than 4 to 5 hours you can bake with it. Most likely you will have to feed it at least one more time, though, for it to expand that quickly and be lively enough for baking.
After mixing the dough, keep about 25g starter in your jar and feed it. Leave it out of the refrigerator until it doubles. Then refrigerate the starter until your next bake. If you don’t bake for more than a week, refresh your starter as described below.
Refreshment without Baking
Make sure you refresh your gluten free sourdough starter once a week even if you’re not planning to bake. Take your starter out of the refrigerator and let the jar come to room temperature. Discard down to 25 grams and feed with 25 grams of gluten free flour mix and 25 grams of water. Once it doubles, put it back in the refrigerator.
Possible Uses for Discard
You may be able to incorporate the gluten-free starter discard into a recipe for Indian dosas, which are thin fermented rice-and-lentil pancakes.
Composting is also a good option.
Here’s the recipe and method I use to make my: Gluten Free Sourdough Bread.
Melissa’s Notes
Flour Type
I used both store-bought brown rice flour (Arrowhead Mills) and home-milled brown rice flour (Carolina) to try out this starter creation process. The home-milled brown rice starter was thicker and more active from the get-go. I eventually began feeding the Arrowhead Mills brown rice flour starter more flour (60g instead of 50g, and 30g instead of 25g) so the two starters would have a similar consistency.
Milling brown rice and beginning to create the starters. While I milled some white rice to “clean” the mill stones, my brown rice flour is cross-contaminated with wheat/gluten. If I were providing bread to someone with celiacs, I would have a dedicated GF mill.
Basically, I wanted both starters to be thick enough to not run up the sides of the jar if I jostled the jar a bit after I cleaned the inside of the jar with a spatula. Moreover, thicker starter trapped the air from fermentation better, allowing me to see the expansion of the starter.
My home-milled brown rice flour starter began almost-doubling after feedings around Day 6. I maintained that jar but also created a third jar to feed the flour blend (brown rice flour and Breadtopia GF Bread flour) that Sierra suggests.
Home-milled brown rice flour; Arrowhead Mills brown rice flour; Blend of home-milled brown rice flour and Breadtopia GF bread flour
Both my home-milled brown rice flour starter and my blended flour starter were doubling before the Arrowhead Mills brown rice flour starter. Similar to Sierra’s starter, this began doubling around Day 12.
Temperature
My starters took off right away with maybe 25-50% expansion past the rubber band, but then they looked “dead” on days 3 and 4. This was consistent with a drop in temperature in my home as well as what usually happens when I make regular wheat flour starters. As the pH drops, different microbes begin to dominate the culture, but during this switchover, the starter looks dormant.
To help the starter “catch up” and not be overfed, I stirred it and skipped a feeding. I also kept the temperature of the starter in the high 70s for about a week.
In these photos, you can see the difference between starter that is still expanding, just after it has peaked and is starting to flatten, and when it has fallen and is past ripe. I aim to use the starter somewhere between the first and second photos.
The Arrowhead Mills brown rice flour starter around Day 10 with a dome, flat top, and deflated/past ripe
Mold and Jars
Both my home-milled brown rice and my Arrowhead Mills brown rice starter developed tiny amounts of mold on the inside of the lids after about a week. I transferred the starters to new clean jars/lids when I discovered this, and washed the originals jars and lids with soapy boiling water. The starters seemed unaffected.
