Sourdough Series Part 2a: How to Care for Your Sourdough Starter
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Sourdough bread baking can be one of the most fascinating and satisfying culinary activities. With a little knowledge and experience, making high-quality artisanal sourdough bread at home is achievable for the home baker.
Probably the most important step in the entire process is the keeping and maintaining of your starter.
The quality of the final bake depends on the strength and health of the starter. And the quality of the experience for the baker depends on the simplicity of the process. Keeping a starter can be tedious, messy, and wasteful, OR it can be simple, tidy, and manageable.
So let’s talk about how to care for your sourdough starter and how to make it a seamless part of your routine.
The Basics of Keeping a Sourdough Starter
What is Starter?
A sourdough starter is a mixture of flour and water and is home to a colony of beneficial bacteria and yeast. These microbes feed on the starches in the flour, which causes the microbes to grow, reproduce, and release gas. It’s this process, the releasing of gas particularly, that makes sourdough bread rise.
Learn more about sourdough, what it is and how it works, here.
Feeding the Starter
To keep the microbes in the starter vibrant and healthy, strong enough to raise a loaf of bread, they must be fed. Sourdough starter should be fed at regular intervals (every 12-24 hours if kept at room temperature) with equal parts flour and water.
With each feeding, the starter goes through a predictable cycle.
As the microbes feed on the starches, the starter will grow in size. Around the 6-8 hour mark, the starter will have doubled in size, there will be lots of bubbles, and it will have a pleasant tangy aroma.
Every time the starter is fed, a portion of it must first be discarded. Discarding doesn’t have to mean throwing it away. There are many things we can do with discard. More on that later.
Why Do We Discard?
The most common questions I get about sourdough have to do with discard, especially why we discard.
The reason is a mathematical one.
Because the amount of flour and water we feed the starter must always be at minimum equal to (or greater than) the starter itself, the starter would grow exponentially with each feeding if we did not discard a portion of it.
For example, if on Monday, we feed a 20 gram starter with 20 grams of flour and 20 grams of water, then on Tuesday, if we didn't discard, we'd be feeding a 60 gram starter with 60 grams of flour and 60 grams of water, and on Wednesday, a 180 gram starter with 180 grams of water and 180 grams of flour...you can see where this is going.
Things would very quickly get out of hand.
And so, every time we feed the starter, we first discard most of it.
Now, I hate food waste as much as anyone, and I know that pouring off that discard sounds painful. Keep reading. My methods for keeping a starter help to minimize the discard, and there are so many great things to do with discard, that you really never need to actually throw it away.
It all begins with how you feed your starter
Feeding Your Sourdough Starter
To keep a vibrant starter, we must always feed the starter flour and water that is at minimum equal to the starter itself. It’s common to feed at a ratio of 1:1:1—that is, 1 part starter to 1 part flour to 1 part water.
I recommend, however, feeding at a ratio of 1:5:5, keeping that 1-part quite small, around just 10 grams (approximately 1 Tablespoon). This makes for a small, dry, concentrated starter that is easy to work with, doesn’t take up much space in the kitchen, and will last longer between feedings, further minimizing discard.
Read more about keeping a “dry” or concentrated starter here.
A maintenance routine looks something like this:
Measure out 10 grams (or 1 Tablespoon) of starter and place in a fresh jar. *Set the rest aside as discard. More on what to do with this in a moment.
Add 50 grams (or 5 Tablespoons) flour and water and stir to combine thoroughly.
Place the lid loosely and set aside for 24 hours until ready for the next feeding. Alternatively, place the starter in the refrigerator where it can go up to a week (or more) between feedings.
*For the discard: Whip up a quick fried bread by heating a little oil in a skillet and pouring the discard in, OR, store the discard in the fridge, adding more to it each day, until you have enough for muffins or pancakes or something equally quick and wonderful.
**Note: These notes are for daily maintenance. Prepping to bake looks a little bit different. More on this later.
The Sourdough Starter at Room Temperature
Keep your starter at room temperature if you plan to bake with it daily or even every other day. Follow the above guidelines for maintenance.
The Sourdough Starter in the Fridge
I love keeping my sourdough starter in the fridge for minimal maintenance and waste. When I go through seasons of heavy baking, I keep it at room temperature so it’s always active and ready for me, but when I’m going light on baking, the fridge is the best place for my starter.
Keep your starter in the fridge if you plan to bake with it only once or twice a week, or even less frequently. It will keep in the fridge in a dormant or semi-dormant state indefinitely. You can take it out of the fridge to feed it weekly, bi-monthly, or even less frequently.
When you take it from the fridge to feed it, let it come to room temperature before feeding. Once it’s fed, be sure there’s plenty of activity (meaning, it bubbles and doubles in size) before stowing it away in the fridge again.
Alternatively, rather than warming and feeding the entire jar of starter, you can prepare to bake straight from the dormant starter you keep in your fridge by taking the tiniest bit of starter from the jar and building it up until it’s active and ready for use.
Dealing with Discard
As mentioned above, there is no reason to actually discard the “discard.” You can cook it up on the spot as a tasty flatbread or you can stash it in its own jar in the fridge, adding more discard to it as you have it. When you have stashed enough discard, use it in one of the many recipes found all over the internet that calls for discard.
Moving From Starter to Dough
Now, the purpose of keeping a sourdough starter is to bake bread—and pizza, and bagels, and buns, and...I’m getting ahead of myself—with the sourdough starter.
So, when you are ready to use your sourdough starter in a recipe, there are a couple things you should know.
Some recipes call for a particular amount of sourdough starter, usually around 1 cup or so. You can bulk up your starter to the amount necessary for your recipe by overfeeding it.
Other recipes will ask you to “build leaven.” Simply put, leaven is bulked up starter. See Building A Leaven for how to prep your starter for baking bread.
And now you are ready to keep and care for your starter with simplicity and ease.
Keeping a sourdough starter doesn’t have to be a sloppy, time-consuming process. With a little knowledge and practice, it can fit into your daily life with no fuss at all.
