It took me two years to start baking with sourdough, and the reason wasn't laziness. The reason was that I'd read too much about it first.

The internet will tell you the starter must be fed twice daily at precise intervals, that the water must be filtered, the flour from a particular mill, the temperature held at 26 degrees. There are people who name their starter and take it on holiday.

Most of this is nonsense. Bread has been made for thousands of years, overwhelmingly by people without thermometers or kitchen scales.

What a starter actually is

Briefly, because the biology helps make sense of the rest. A sourdough starter is a mixed culture of wild yeasts and lactic acid bacteria feeding on the starches and sugars in flour.

The yeasts produce carbon dioxide, which is the lift that makes bread rise. The bacteria produce lactic and acetic acid, which give the flavour and, incidentally, make the environment inhospitable to unwanted organisms.

That last point matters for anyone worried about growing something harmful. A working starter is acidic, and most problematic bacteria can't establish themselves in acidic conditions. The system defends itself.

Starting one, honestly described

You need flour and water. That's it.

A jar, roughly 50 grams of wholemeal rye flour, roughly 50 grams of lukewarm water. Mix, cover loosely, leave it.

Wholemeal rye because the bran carries more microorganisms than white wheat flour. Wheat works too, it just takes longer.

Then each day discard about half and top up with the same amount of flour and water. Not to the minute. Once a day is entirely sufficient in the early stages.

After two or three days something alarming often happens: it bubbles vigorously and smells strange, sometimes cheesy. Those are usually bacteria that establish themselves early and disappear later. Don't throw it out, keep going.

After roughly five to ten days it reliably doubles in volume within a few hours of feeding and smells pleasantly sour, somewhere between yoghurt and apple. That's when it's ready.

What you can ignore

Filtered water. In most municipal supplies the chlorine level is low enough not to trouble the culture. If you're unsure, leave the water standing uncovered for an hour.

Precise feeding times. The starter doesn't keep a clock. Neglect makes it slower and it recovers afterwards.

Expensive flour. Ordinary organic wholemeal rye from a supermarket is fine for the starter.

A name. I'm only half joking. The anthropomorphising is a significant reason people experience the whole thing as an exhausting obligation.

What actually matters

Temperature. The single most important factor. At 20 degrees everything takes about twice as long as at 26. If your starter won't get going, it's nearly always too cold. A spot on top of the fridge or near a radiator solves most of it.

The ratio of starter to feed. Feeding more than the amount of starter you keep makes it milder and slower. Feeding less makes it sourer and faster. That's how you steer the flavour.

When you use it. Best shortly after peak, when it's reached maximum volume. Too early and there isn't enough lift; too late and it has already fallen and turned sourer.

The fridge is your friend

The most practical tip anyone gave me, and one the guides never mention: the starter belongs in the fridge if you're not baking regularly.

At fridge temperature everything runs so slowly that feeding every one to two weeks is enough. A day or two before baking, take it out, feed it twice, and it's active again.

That turns a daily obligation into an occasional task. Which is precisely the difference between a hobby you keep and one you abandon after six weeks.

Realistic expectations

A note on the discard, because it bothers people and it should. Throwing away half a jar of flour and water every day feels wasteful, and over weeks it adds up to a real quantity.

Two fixes. Keep a smaller starter — twenty grams of each is plenty for a home baker and reduces the discard by more than half. Or collect the discard in a container in the fridge and use it. Discard makes perfectly good pancakes, flatbreads and crackers, and it does not need to be active for any of those since you are adding baking powder or simply frying it.

The other thing worth saying, because nobody does: the hydration percentages you see quoted are not laws. A dough at 75 percent hydration is wetter, harder to handle and gives a more open crumb. At 65 percent it is easier to shape and gives a tighter one. Neither is correct. If your dough is a puddle you cannot work with, use less water next time and stop reading recipes that tell you the puddle is a sign of mastery.

Your first loaf won't look like the photographs. It will probably be flatter and denser, and that's almost always down to a short proof or a cold room.

Completely normal. It'll still taste better than most of what you can buy, and it improves with every attempt, because you develop a feel for the dough that can't be written down.

And if the starter eventually dies because you forgot about it for a month — it costs fifty grams of flour to begin another. That's the thing that gets lost entirely in the sourdough cult: the stakes are essentially zero.