Hey, I'm Chip Walton, and I am the digital producer for the Splendid Table.

Our team has been listening through the archives, looking for interviews that are particularly useful right now,

and I have to say, my mind, as it often does, went straight to bread.

So many of you have been sharing photos on social media of beautiful loaves you've baked.

But we've seen just as many people asking, what is an easy way to get started?

That got me thinking back to when Bridget Lancaster, from America's Test Kitchen,

told us about the easy steps to make a sourdough starter at home.

Here's Bridget from her home kitchen.

So I'm Bridget Lancaster. I work for America's Test Kitchen and we're here in my kitchen in

Marblehead, just north of Boston. Today we're working a little bit of sourdough. And George, my assistant,

is always here to help me. Aren't you George? So George is currently my favorite child. He is an 150-some pound Newfoundland. George is a great crumb catcher. George would love the sourdough. Bread is one of George's favorite foods, isn't it, George? Yeah. So many people are really intimidated by sourdough, but it's basically, if you've ever had a goldfish and you've kept it alive for more than a couple of months, you can make sourdough. You need flour and you need water. And that's it. There's something great about starting a recipe with so little. And in the flour, there's wild yeast already in there. And there's

bacteria in there as well. And the yeast and the bacteria get to work. It's like a little

Pac-Man. They're starting to feed off of the natural sugars. And they start to procreate

and they multiply, creating thousands and thousands of microorganisms. This is George telling me to be quiet. George, come here.

Here, buddy. You want a cookie? He loves these little cookies, this little dog biscuits. So it's always

good to use a glass container when you're starting sourdough. That way you can see what's going on

underneath the surface. So the flour we're using as a mix, almost equal parts of whole wheat flour and all-purpose flour.

It's a good idea to use organic flour for this because it's been processed less.

So it's so easy to make. You have a cup of the flour mix and room temp water for the water you

want to use distilled water filtered water you don't want to use tap water tap water

has chlorine in it and the chlorine has been shown to kill the yeast let me go

get a wooden spoon you can also use a rubber spatula for this so I'm just mixing

...