Feeding and Maintaining Your Sourdough Starter (2024)

FAQs

How do you feed maintain and store a sourdough starter? ›

Leaving it out on the counter, it will need to be fed equal parts water and flour every 12-24 hours. Warmer homes or frequent baking will require more frequent feeding (around every 12 hours), while colder homes every 24 hours. Storing your sourdough starter in the fridge will require feeding around once a week.

With each sourdough starter feeding, you'll be discarding some to avoid it from becoming overly acidic. Most will compost or trash this discard, but you can save it and use it in other recipes!

stir your starter in between feedings - try stirring it twice in between feedings and really give it a chance to get oxygen into the mix. This will help to activate your starter without too much effort.

Discard a portion of the starter and feed it with fresh flour and water every 24 hours. Twice-Daily Feeding: In warmer environments or if you prefer a faster fermentation process, you can feed your starter twice a day, approximately every 12 hours. This helps maintain a more active and vigorous starter.

If you aren't intending to use your sourdough starter every day, it is best kept in the fridge. To do this, feed it as instructed above, seal the jar and then stand at room temperature for 2-3 hours (to help reinvigorate the yeast) before placing in the fridge to store.

It's important to note that overfeeding can also have negative effects on a sourdough starter if done excessively or too frequently. If the starter is overfed, it can become too acidic or develop an unpleasant odor which is the result of excess food rotting in the jar.

If you don't get rid of the excess, eventually you'll have more starter than your feedings can sustain. After a few days, your daily 1/4 cup flour and water won't be enough to sustain your entire jar of starter, and your starter will be slow and sluggish, not much better than discard itself.

Can I leave my starter out overnight after feeding it? Yes, if you have just fed it.

Remember, you can't use the discard from your homemade sourdough starter for the first 7 days. You can use sourdough discard in all kinds of sourdough discard recipes, including these no wait sourdough recipes, overnight sourdough discard recipes and sourdough discard recipes that use up a lot of discard.

If your starter gets completely covered on top with bubbles but does not rise, it is healthy but may just be a wet mix. Try reducing the water in your next feeding and see if you have different results. Also, the type of flour you are using can impede the rise of your starter.

Can you stir sourdough starter with a metal spoon? ›

Things that WON'T kill your sourdough starter

METAL: Stirring your starter with a metal spoon or placing it in a metal bowl won't kill your starter. While we don't recommend making or keeping your starter in contact with reactive metals like copper or aluminum, stainless steel is harmless.

While the short answer is that you should loosely cover your sourdough starter, there are times when you can have a tight fitting lid, which I will explain.

If you are keeping your sourdough starter on the counter, you could leave it for a few hours and then you'd need to feed it again ready to make your next batch. Whether you use your starter in your bread making or you discard your starter in other ways - you MUST discard to keep your starter healthy and thriving.

How to increase a starter. If your recipe calls for more than 227g (about 1 cup) of starter, feed it without discarding until you've reached the amount you need (plus 113g to keep and feed again).

If I am not going to be using my starter for a few days, or a couple of weeks, I feed it and put it in the fridge. Over time it might have a greyish liquid start to collect in it, called hooch. It is a natural alcohol that your starter produces, and it just tells you that it is hungry.

Your sourdough starter is the foundation of baking sourdough bread. Through proper maintenance and a little attention, it can last indefinitely and provide you with countless healthy and delicious loaves of bread.

A 1:2:2 feeding ratio would consist of one part existing starter, two parts flour and two parts water. For example, if you have 30g of existing starter, you would feed it 60g of flour and 60g of flour. The most common feeding ratios for daily maintenance are 1:1:1 or 1:2:2.

Yeasts and bacteria don't only love warm, but also humid environments. 🌾If you want to keep your starter on the counter, I advise you feed it every 12h, possibly in a ratio of 1:4:4 /1:5:5. However if you don't bake daily, I would advise to store the starter in the fridge to avoid as much as you can waste.

Just smear some fresh sourdough starter in a thin layer over a piece of parchment paper and let dry. Once dry, the starter will easily separate from the paper and can be ground up into small pieces and placed in a plastic ziplock bag. Store your starter in the freezer for as long as you like.