- Sourdough basics
- Starter care
Feeding your starter: a simple weekly rhythm
How to keep a starter strong with ten minutes a week, whether you bake every day or once a month.
Walter Braandt3 2 min read
A sourdough starter is flour and water plus the wild yeast and bacteria that move in. It is far tougher than its reputation. Most starters that seem to be failing are simply hungry, cold or fed on an irregular schedule.
If you bake every day
Keep the starter on the counter and feed it once or twice a day. Discard all but 20 g, then stir in 100 g of flour and 100 g of lukewarm water. At this 1:5:5 ratio it peaks in six to ten hours at room temperature, which lines up neatly with a morning or evening mix.
If you bake once a week or less
Keep it in the fridge and feed it once a week. Two feeds at room temperature the day before you bake bring it back to full strength.
- Mark the level with a rubber band after feeding, so you can see how far it rises.
- Add a spoonful of rye flour to each feed. It gives the yeast extra food and a more reliable rise.
- Grey liquid on top, called hooch, means it is hungry. Pour it off and feed it.
Reading the signs
| What you see | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Doubled, domed top, lots of bubbles | At its peak | Use it now |
| Collapsed, streaks down the jar | Past its peak | Feed it and wait for the next rise |
| Barely rises after a feed | Too cold or underfed | Move it somewhere warmer and feed twice a day |
A neglected starter can almost always be revived. Three feeds in a warm spot bring most of them back.
Kitchen testedLast baked
Written by
Walter Braandt
Head baker
Walter baked for forty years in his family's bakery before turning his home kitchen into a classroom. He writes the methods here and tests each one at least three times before it goes up.
