Should You Store Your Sourdough Starter In A Plastic Or Glass Jar?

With many types of bread out there, there's a loaf for everyone. From crispy baguettes to the rich pumpernickel, bread is one of the bedrocks of cuisine. We use it in sandwiches and serve it with butter at restaurants. We make French toast with it and even grind down stale loaves for breadcrumbs to top mac and cheese. In the vast world of bread, some stand out, and one of those is sourdough. It's a bread rooted in time in the most literal sense, one that wouldn't exist without a sourdough starter.

Sourdough bread has a long history, with its origin dating back to ancient Egypt. Many people have a sourdough starter passed down through their family for many years or generations. One question that comes up is about the best kind of jar to store your sourdough starter. We're here to tell you the answer is simple: glass jars are the way to go.

Sourdough starter is a thing to be treasured and well-maintained. One way to do that is to make sure you are using glass jars to store your starter. This isn't just a matter of aesthetics (though mason jars full of starter are pretty to look at), but of science. Plastic jars offer one real downside: plastic degrades over time and can leach into what's in the jar. It can lead to your sourdough starter having a funky taste, and nobody wants that.

Swap that plastic jar out for a glass one and you'll avoid any risk of nasty plastic leaching into your starter. Another benefit of glass jars is they are more often wide-mouthed, which makes removing the starter from the jar a lot easier than with narrow, plastic containers. Glass is also easier to clean than plastic, which makes your job simpler when it comes time to wash your jars.

If you are going to use plastic containers to store your sourdough starter, there are some things to keep in mind. Since a wide mouth is best, shoot for plastic containers like the ones the deli serves soup in; you may even have one already in your cabinet. While leaching is a concern, you can minimize it by replacing the container with a new one periodically.

Glass may be the preferred method because it offers some clear benefits, but it's not without its own pitfalls. For one thing, glass is not really forgiving when it comes to breakage. If you accidentally let that jar tumble there's a real risk of glass getting into your starter. Baking bread from scratch is fun, but having to start the process over from scratch is less so.

Plastic and glass containers may both be choices, but one thing's for sure: you want to avoid using metal for your starter. According to baker Carroll Pellegrinelli (via Southern Living), the fermentation process can corrode metal. Whether you choose plastic or glass, it's time to get that starter going.