How to Feed Your Sourdough Starter + Storage Tips: Beginner Friendly Guide
I thought I’d follow up my sourdough recipe post with a beginner-friendly post learning more about sourdough starter, how to look after it and how to feed it. Everything below is my simplified (though somewhat lengthy) beginner’s interpretation of it all. The art of looking after your sourdough starter can definitely depend on even more factors than what I’ve listed below, but I’m hoping this simplified version helps give you a good beginner’s understanding to a fellow beginner. It should be enough to get you started.
WHERE TO GET SOURDOUGH STARTER
You can get sourdough starter either by buying it from someone who sells starter (whether it be a store or private baker) or getting it gifted from a friend who bakes sourdough. Most people who bake sourdough will be ‘discarding’ excess starter regularly as it’s always growing in size and so would be more than happy to give some to you instead of wasting it and putting it in the bin.
FIGURING OUT YOUR OWN ROUTINE
This was one of the MOST challenging things for me to understand when I first started baking sourdough. Every recipe I looked up, every video I watched and every person I asked had their own individual regime that worked for them and I just couldn’t figure out which one to follow or what was right for me.
It turns out that unlike kombucha SCOBYs or water kefir grains, where most people’s instructions and recipes are quite standard and universal, sourdough starter feeding regimes all seem to vary greatly between different people. Some people feed their starter twice a day (like a real pet!) and others weekly, or anywhere in between.
And after reading way too many blog posts, I finally kind of figured out why it varies so much. I think the reason why everyone’s sourdough starter care regime differs from each other is that it is tailored to that individual’s lifestyles and preferences, including factors like the below:
baking schedule: so how often they plan to make sourdough bread / how much bread they intend to bake each time. E.g. if you’re baking bread every single day because you run a bakery, then your sourdough starter care regime (feeding schedule, etc) will differ to someone who only intends to bake say, once a week or once a fortnight)
time available to feed: are you happy to feed it every single day or would you rather not have sourdough baking be so tiring?
other things: do you want to feed your starter more regularly so it’s always in an active state, or do you prefer to keep it more dormant and you’re happy to spend extra effort making it more active when the time comes to bake?
I think that based on the above individual requirements, people then tailor and modify the way they look after their sourdough starter to suit!
So how do I look after MY sourdough starter?
My preferences:
How often do I want to bake?
I want to bake sourdough bread once a week on the weekends (and I prefer to make at least 2 loaves - we always keep 2 loaves for ourselves and prior to lockdown, I’d bake 4-5 loaves a week in one batch and gift the rest to family, friends and neighbours).
How much time I have available to feed it:
I’m lucky that I work from home and am home most days so am happy to feed it on a regular-ish basis, however I’m in no mood to keep up sourdough baking if I were to need to feed it every single day.
Based on the above, I chose to look after my starter like this:
I keep my sourdough starter (the mother) in the fridge.
I feed my sourdough starter (the mother) twice a week, on Tuesday and Friday nights (days are important).
Each time I feed my sourdough starter (the mother), I feed it 25-30g filtered water and the same amount in flour (I use Wallaby’s Baker’s Flour). Use a kitchen scale to measure this exactly. And once you put in the water and flour, mix it together.
Note: some people feed wholemeal or a mix of different flours but I like to simplify things and so I just use baker’s flour and it’s been fine for me.
On Tuesdays when I feed my starter, I put it back in the fridge.
On Fridays when I feed my starter, I also do something else. Because remember I bake on weekends. Here is when it gets a bit complicated (but not really because I’m going to break it down for you!)
On Friday, I will take out my mother starter. From this jar, I will take out around 80-100g (depending on how much I need for baking on the weekend) of mother starter and put it in another jar. This starter that I take out, will be the starter I prepare and use for baking on the weekend.
For my mother starter, after I have taken out the 80-100g starter, I will then proceed to feed it 25-30 g water & flour. Mix it together, and put it back in the fridge.
For the separate starter I have taken out, I will feed this the same weight in water and flour. So if I have taken out 80g starter, I will then proceed to feed it 80g water and 80g flour. I mix it together thorough and I keep it in the warmest room in my house overnight. This is the starter I am using for baking on the weekend.
To clarify. My mother starter lives in the fridge and lives a largely dormant-ish life. My starter that I take out and leave on the bench is one that I encourage to become more active so I can use ‘active starter’ in my baking.
WHY DO I FEED MY MOTHER STARTER ONLY a LITTLE EACH TIME?
I feed it 25-30g no matter how much starter I have in the jar. I know that the standard rule is that you feed it the same weight in water and flour (aka if your mother starter weighs 100g, you feed it 100g in water and 100g in flour). I so wanted to do this too because it just seemed correct because that’s what most people do. However, my friend who gave me my sourdough starter told me she does it differently and only feeds it 25-30g each time and that her starter was fine with it. This way, you do not end up with an overwhelming amount of starter and having to discard it all the time (or figure out something else to do with the discards). So I decided to follow suit mainly because I didn’t want to have so much excessive starter and have to discard the extra. And it works perfectly fine for me too.
Let me explain. My mother starter lives in the fridge and when you put your starter in the fridge, the cold temperature makes it more dormant, and I guess because of that it’s happy to be less hungry. Like a hibernating animal. So, when I feed my rather dormant mother starter 25-30g twice a week, it seems to be totally fine with it.
By feeding my mother starter only 25-30g twice a week, I do not end up with excess starter that I need to discard. But I also don’t end up with an unbalanced mother starter because every Friday when I’m preparing to bake, the starter I take out to put in another jar is basically my discard. And as long as I bake at least 2 breads a week, the whole feeding schedule balances itself out in that I have actually never had to discard starter to put in the bin or figure out something to do with it - I just use my discard for my baking. Which is amazing because I hated the idea of wasting all that starter if I couldn’t be bothered dealing with the discard.
Of course, if I were to change my baking schedule and say, wanted to start baking more often during the week or make other things as well (in addition to the 2-5 loaves I make a week), then I would not have enough starter to work with. If this was the case then I would have to adapt my feeding schedule to maybe feed my mother more so I can take out more starter to use, or maybe I could just bake less bread (say 2 loaves a week) and use the starter I would have used to do the other 3 loaves on whatever else I wanted to make. But I highly doubt I want to make more than 5 sourdough things a week haha.
Anyway, this works for me so I’m sticking with it for now!
MANIPULATING YOUR SOURDOUGH STARTER FEEDING TO YOUR NEEDS
Some people keep their mother starter out of the fridge and just on the bench. Keeping your mother starter in a warmer place like so means that it becomes less dormant and more active, and so you probably have to feed it more or feed it more often. This is great if you want to bake more frequently, but you can also take advantage of an active mother starter in that when you’re baking, you don’t need to wait a long time to activate it. I don’t follow this kind of feeding regime so I don’t know too much about it.
SO HOW SHOULD YOU FEED YOUR SOURDOUGH STARTER?
I think the best thing you should do is find follow a starter feeding schedule that works for you. Find someone’s feeding schedule that allows you to feed the starter how often you want to and how much bread you want to bake. Keep looking until one works for you and just follow that and see how you go.
If you too only want to bake one batch on weekends and happy to feed it twice a week, then just copy & paste the above! If you want to bake a fresh bread twice a week or every day then have a hunt for someone who does the same.
HOW DO I KNOW MY STARTER IS ACTIVE ENOUGH FOR BAKING?
One last thing to cover and an important one too! Here are a few tell tale signs to go with:
Your starter has doubled or almost doubled in size. I measure this by placing a rubber band where the starter level is after I first feed it then check back to see how much it has risen. Usually, I’ll bake with it when it has risen at least 70-80% of its size. Mainly because it’s winter here in Melbourne at the moment and it’s just so cold I can’t be bothered aiming for perfect peak activeness because it’s takes too long and be too frustrating. Compromises.
When you take a spoonful of your starter out and pop it in a jar of water, it floats.
It’s really bubbly
WHAT IF I USE STARTER THAT IS NOT ACTIVE ENOUGH?
The starter will rise up, hit a peak, then rise down. What you want to do is catch it as close to the peak as you can as that is the most ‘active’ you can get. But what happens if you missed the peak, or the peak is just not coming? Well for my first couple of bakes, my starter never rose very much. It was the middle of winter in Melbourne and I gave it like, 18+ hrs to do its thing and it never did. I thought it was dead! Turns out, it was just really, really, really cold. I actually baked with it anyway. What happened was that I didn’t get the most perfect sourdough bread, it didn’t really rise much at all, it was a little bland because I didn’t use enough salt but it was still totally edible as bread. So there’s no need to fret, you can still eat it no problems.
What I have since done is encourage it to rise by using a heat source like a wheat bag. I wouldn’t say it’s best option as it’s localised heat that is uneven. But I really wanted my bread so I was happy to compromise and get a non-perfect risen bread than a flat one. You can also use an oven or microwave as like an insulated box but those options didn’t work for me as for some reason they weren’t much warmer. My most recent bake (August 15, 2020) was the first day I didn’t have to use the wheat bag anymore. My starter rose naturally with the temperature of the home - spring is finally coming! And that bake turned out amazing because it rose in an evenly heated room temperature.
I hope this guide helps in the beginning of your sourdough baking journey! If you haven’t already, you can check out my other post below:
