Sourdough has a way of making you feel like you’re failing a science exam before you’ve even had your coffee. I remember the early days clearly — a windowsill lined with jars, each one a slightly different failed experiment, and a growing suspicion that everyone else on the internet had been handed some secret I hadn’t.
Looking back now, from a kitchen that turns out a loaf most days without much drama, I can see exactly where I made things harder than they needed to be. Here are the sourdough mistakes to avoid if you’re just starting out.
1. I’d Get a Starter From Someone, Not Try to Make One Myself
I spent weeks trying to coax a starter into existence from flour and water alone, watching it for signs of life like it owed me an explanation. Some days it bubbled. Some days it sulked. I never really knew if I was feeding it wrong, if my kitchen was too cold, or if I’d simply killed it and was now just stirring a jar of paste out of stubbornness.
What nobody tells you enough is that a mature starter from someone else skips all of that uncertainty entirely. It’s already stable. It already knows what it’s doing. You’re not troubleshooting a newborn culture, you’re just learning to feed and maintain something that’s already alive and well. If I could go back, I’d ask around — a neighbour, a local baker, a homesteading group — before I’d spend a single week trying to build one from scratch.
2. I’d Start With Sandwich Bread, Not Artisan Loaves
I wanted the loaf. You know the one — the deep ear, the open crumb, the crackling crust that looks like it belongs in a bakery window. So that’s what I tried to make, right from the very beginning, with a starter I barely understood and a shaping technique I’d only ever seen in videos.
It was too much, too soon. Artisan loaves ask a lot of you at once: high hydration doughs that are hard to handle, precise shaping, scoring, steam, timing. When it didn’t work, I didn’t know if the problem was my starter, my technique, my oven, or all three.
A humble sandwich loaf in a tin would have taught me the fundamentals without punishing me for not having them yet. Lower hydration, forgiving shaping, a tin that does most of the structural work for you. You still get real sourdough flavour and all the digestive benefits of proper fermentation, but you’re not trying to defeat gravity and chemistry on day one. The fancy loaves can come later, once you actually understand what your dough is doing and why.
3. I’d Focus on Using the Discard in Easy Recipes Like Crackers
Discard became its own quiet source of guilt. I knew it was useful, I knew people did wonderful things with it, and instead I mostly poured it down the drain feeling vaguely wasteful about it. Part of the problem was that I kept looking at discard recipes that were nearly as involved as the bread itself — more steps, more waiting, more room to get something wrong.
Crackers changed that for me. Mix, roll, cut, bake. No proofing, no shaping anxiety, no waiting to see if something rises the way it’s supposed to. It’s the kind of recipe where using your discard doesn’t feel like a whole second project bolted onto your day. Once that habit was in place, it opened the door to trying discard in other easy things too, but crackers were the entry point that actually stuck.
The Bigger Lesson
None of these three things were really about technique. They were about giving myself permission to start simple. A borrowed starter, a humble loaf, an easy way to use what would otherwise go to waste — none of it is glamorous, and none of it will get you a loaf worth photographing on day one. But it’s the version of getting started that actually holds, instead of the version that looks impressive and quietly falls apart.
If you’re standing at the beginning of your own sourdough journey right now, wondering why it feels so much harder than it should — it isn’t you. It’s just that most of us started in the wrong order.
With Warmth,
Marle
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