Australia... can you make sourdough starter with Home Brand flour and tap water?

Just to get your starter going, I'd suggest this: Buy a bag of stoneground organic wholmeal flour. Just one bag - 0.5 to 1Kg. That's more than enough to get you going.

Start with a clean jar - 100g flour, 100g water, mix with your hand, cover and leave. (room temperature, but no more than about 24C) 24 hours later, add another 100g flour, 100g water, mix with your hand, cover and leave. Same again on the 3rd day. (You'll need a big jar!) by the 4th day you should have a bubbling mass of "stuff". You'll probably need to throw about half of this away now, (because the jar is full - make pancakes with it) then another 2 days of 100g flour + 100g water, but at this point you can start to use white flour and from then on use the cheaper  white flour. By day 6 it ought to be going just fine and ready to use, although it will get better with time. If you get a dark liquid on-top just stir it back in (search for sourdough hooch for details) If you use a 1 litre jar then aim to keep about 300g in it, but you can cut it back down, but that's about what I keep.

So at this point, it can live in the fridge.

Check your local water though - I use tap water and always have, but some folks use filtered or boiled and cooled.

-Gordon

...all it take is some fruit peel and you can use it to build your own sourdough starter. Failing that, it might be worth coughing up a few bucks to buy a powdered dried sourdough starter. You'll only need to do it once.

I won't say your method is impossible, but you are making it very difficult for yourself. Organic, stoneground flour is rich in natural yeast, so making a starter with it is easy. Why not buy a bag - still only an investment of a  few bucks - and get your starter up and running? You could then feed it with plain flour. Why you'd choose to do that is another question. :) You'll save so much cash making your own bread, it would surely be worth re-investing a little in tastier flour?

BTW, although tap water is fine (I've never used anything else for my starters), be careful after heavy storms. It'll be chlorinated and need to rest in sunlight for a day to dissipate it or else your starter will suffer.

which is now a few months old, was begun with AP and Brita-filtered tap water that I keep at room temp. It took longer than I had expected to activate, about a week, but if you don't feel you can afford even a small amount of premium flour, you can still get a starter going. I still feed it the same way, and have also used it to create a couple of other starters by taking parts of it then feeding it different flour. 

First off, you don't need to waste all that expensive flour.  You can use 25g-30g vs 100g and accomplish the same thing.  You're working with math here, so keep that in mind.  I do heartily recommend the pancakes with the waste.  I add 1 egg for every cup of starter for my pancake batter; pretty heavenly! 

My water is pretty alkaline due to heavy chlorine.  I've had good experience just using the Brita type filters too.  So that might work for you.

Lastly, remember that the sourdough yeastie-beasties prefer an acidic environment.  You can add either a small (and I do mean wee bit, like a 1/4 teaspoon) bit of pineapple juice or plain white vinegar initially.  It  does flavor the starter.  Just keep that in mind.  It doesn't hurt; but just takes a few refreshes to get rid of that specific ingredient taste.

Hope that helps.

I've only ever started my starters using rye flour.  It didn't fail.  Just rye flour and water for a few days, and then a steady transition to just using all-purpose wheat flour to feed. I've seen people add things like pineapple juice and that might work, but isn't necessary in my experience.  I think I could get a starter going with maybe 200g  or 300g of rye flour total, before I've moved off it to straight wheat flour. 

Rye, from what I remember, is rich with the organisms you want.  Processed flour, and I believe even whole grain wheat flour, are not likely to work.  There is a video somewhere of a woman who starts with grapes, which I believe are also loaded with the right organisms.  Possibly then the flour wouldn't be so important.

To answer the question: yes, pretty much any wheat flour and tap water will be fine after you've gotten it going.  Early on, you're going to need other ingredients.  I use tap water, and I boil it, on the theory that the chlorine would interfere.  I'm not sure it's really necessary, but it's not hard to do.  Also, I suspect it's possible to ruin a starter gradually: the effects of bad water might take a while to appear.

I don't have much waste.  I maintain only 40g of starter unless I'm building up to make bread.  So 20g goes to waste with each feeding. 

Good luck. 

If you live in Australia and you are familiar with Instagram, I would suggest you go to the Instagram page @apieceofbread. It is a bakery out of Tasmania run by a very knowledgeable baker and he has a step by step system for new starter creation. I would assume due to geographical location you may have access to the same types of flour that he has. I hope this helps.

I live north of Brisbane, Australia and use plain wholemeal flour from Woolwoorths to feed my starter with no problem. If you want to convert any starter to a white levain, just feed with breadflour over two feeds. There are lots of suggestions about that in this post and on the TFL site. I also use the WMF in my bread doughs and produce beautiful bread every time. If you can, buy breadflour in bulk. I don't know where you live; I get mine from Simply Good. They also have grains etc in bulk.

If you don't have filtered water, you can try to fill a jug of tap water and leave it open (or cover with muslin, if you are worried about any beasties going in) on your bench for at least 24 hours. The chlorine will have evaporated by then.

Good luck.

Just read you are from Adelaide. I'm sure there is a bulk supplier for flours down there.