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What is Sourdough Starter?
In simple terms, sourdough starter is a mix of flour and water that contains a symbiotic population of microbes (saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast and lactobacillus bacteria). When you mix starter into your bread dough, you are inoculating your dough with the microbial culture from the starter and over the next several hours, the microbes eat, reproduce, and spread throughout your dough. Some of the yeasts in the starter are eating sugars in the flour and their metabolism releases by-products into the dough. One of those by-products is carbon dioxide (C02) gas: bubbles that physically expand the size of the dough. In both the sourdough starter and the dough, there is a finite amount of “food” and this is why we feed the sourdough starter regularly to keep it alive (and also why we bake the bread before too much time has passed and the dough deflates).
— from the article Demystifiying Sourdough Bread Baking by homebreadbaker
What is Sourdough Starter?