Feeding + Maintaining Your Sourdough Starter
This guide to feeding and maintaining your sourdough starter will teach you everything you need to keep your starter healthy, active, and ready to make delicious bread.
About Sourdough Starter
Feeding or refreshing your sourdough is the process of giving your starter fresh flour and water.
The living bacteria and wild yeast in your starter use the fresh flour and water as energy. They “feed” on the flour and water by fermenting the sugars. The byproduct of this process, carbon dioxide, is what makes dough rise!
You may be surprised to learn that you don’t have to follow the rules when feeding your starter.
While it can be a good idea to follow a basic routine when getting started, everyone feeds their sourdough a little differently. I have personally experimented over the years and changed my feeding methods multiple times.
Your individual feeding routine will depend on how often you use your starter, what type of flour you feed it, the temperature of your home, and the best time to feed it for your bread-baking schedule.
If you treat it right, your starter will give you delicious loaves of bread and amazing discard recipes.
So instead of thinking of your starter as a meticulous recipe to follow, look at it like an in-home science experiment.
Your own sourdough starter schedule will be unique to you- and there is a lot of ebb, flow, and grace around how you nurture it!
The best way to feed your starter will end up being what works for your schedule while maintaining a healthy sourdough starter (remember… it’s flexible!).
Today, I’m sharing how I’ve adapted a feeding schedule to fit my busy lifestyle (homeschooling mom of 4 here) and my family’s high demand for baked goods.
I’ve got tips for feeding, adapting a starter for any routine, and keeping your starter healthy and vibrant- whether you use it daily or once a month.
How To Make A Starter
If you are new to sourdough, you can learn how to make a starter with my tutorial here. All you need to get started is flour, water, and a clean jar.
In as little as two weeks you can be on your way to an established starter and baking your own bread.
Helpful Terms
Active sourdough Starter: An active or ripe starter has been recently fed with flour and water. Within 4-8 hours, you will see medium to large bubbles on the surface of the mixture.
Sourdough Discard: The portion of starter that may need to be discarded in between feedings. For example, if you have 200 grams of flat, runny starter, you may need to discard a portion of the starter before the next feed.
Unfed starter: A flat, inactive sourdough starter is referred to as an unfed starter. Depending on the temperature, the starter will peak in it’s activity around 4-8 hours. You will then see your starter become less and less bubbly as it uses up all of its food sources.
If you bump your starter on the counter, you’ll see gas bubbles form. It’s very much alive!
What Does It Mean To Feed A Starter?
A sourdough starter is a living ferment that uses flour and water to maintain its metabolic functions. One of the byproducts of fermentation is natural yeast, which will raise bread and other baked goods.
While a complex chemical process occurs in your starter at the biological level, feeding your starter can be quite simple.
Once the starter runs out of food it becomes flat and runny. It is no longer active and needs to be fed with bread flour and water (or all-purpose flour or whole wheat flour; this is flexible!).
To feed your starter, you simply remove any extra flat, runny discard until you have a base amount, and add in a portion of flour and water.
(Depending on how much you keep on hand, you may not have extra starter to discard- and that’s fine).
How To Feed Your Starter
Use either bread flour or all-purpose flour to feed your starter. I try to use organic flour as much as possible (King Arthur Flour is my preferred brand).
Use filtered water or bottled water to avoid chemicals from upsetting the beneficial bacteria present.
My current feeding ratio is 1:2:2 for feeding my sourdough. My starter is rich, bubbly, and full of life at this level. It is slightly thick and has a light, clean aroma like paint (this is normal).
To feed: I keep a base of 100 grams of starter in my jar and feed it 200 grams of water and 200 grams of bread flour at every feeding.
I know the weight of the jar I keep my starter in, so I can easily calculate how much I have left in the jar using a kitchen scale. I subtract the weight of the jar from the total weight of the jar + starter.
After I add in the flour and water, I mix the starter very well with a small rubber spatula and set it in a warm spot.
This formula gives me a LOT of sourdough to work with. I can use several cups of sourdough discard for recipes like waffles or crepes or treats like cookies or brownies, and granola bars.
I have also fed my starter a ratio of 1:1:1 – 100 grams starter, 100 grams bread flour, and 100 grams filtered water. Personally, I feel like my starter is more robust when I feed it the 1:2:2 ratio.
We make all of the baked goods my four children consume, so we go through a lot of sourdough in one week!
Your sourdough journey may be different and you may want to only bake a loaf of bread to enjoy here or there. You may not have time or the desire to bake discard recipes.
The good news is you can easily modify a feeding schedule of 1:2:2 to fit your unique needs. Just reduce the amount of base flour to 50 or 40 grams, then feed it double the amount of water and flour.
Just remember, you must always feed your starter MORE flour and water than the total weight of the starter. If you feed it a smaller amount, it will run out of food and may not become active and bubbly.
You will need to have enough flour to create your bread dough AND enough remaining starter to re-feed it after use. Some bread recipes call for 100 grams of starter, so always keep in mind the total amount you need.
Learn how to add strength to your starter here.
Ratios
Some common ratios for feeding sourdough are 1:2:2, 1:1:1, or even 1:5:5. The first part stands for the amount of sourdough still in the jar, and the following numbers stand for flour and water.
If you are feeding with a ratio of 1:2:2, for example, you might have 50 grams of starter in your jar, then feed it with 100 grams of flour and 100 grams of water.
Remember, feeding your sourdough is flexible. For best results, experiment and figure out what works best in your environment and for your schedule.
You can find my best sourdough bread recipes here.
Temperature
The room temperature will impact the activity of your sourdough starter. When temperatures increase, the sourdough starter bacteria become more active. When it gets cooler, the fermentation process slows down.
We keep our kitchen temperature between 70-72 degrees. My starter typically rises in about 4-5 hours. Keep in mind that in the summer months, your starter may become so active that it requires twice daily feedings. Refrigerated starter will take a while to warm back up.
If you are a frequent baker, be sure to keep your kitchen temperature steady and warm.
Feeding Flexibility
Some bakers literally never measure their starter, flour, or water. Instead, they go by the consistency of their starter after mixing in the flour and water.
When I began my sourdough journey, I also took this approach, but my starter was much thinner then. I wanted to create a more robust, thick starter, so I started measuring the amount of starter, flour, and water and feeding it in a ratio of 1:1:1. I eventually switched to a 1:2:2 ratio.
My starter is healthy, strong, and very resilient today.
Refrigerating Your Starter (Occasional Baking)
If you only bake once a week (or less) you can easily store your starter in the refrigerator.
The cooler temperatures will reduce your starter’s activity, putting it on pause until you want to use it again.
Make sure to cover your sourdough jar tightly to protect your starter. While a starter can go a long time in the fridge without being fed, I recommend pulling it out once a week for regular feedings to keep it strong and healthy.
Cold Starter will not work for bread recipes, so remember that you’ll need to take your starter out and feed it before using it in your bread.
The starter may take a while to warm up, so give yourself extra time for it to become active and bubbly.
If you plan on making bread on a Friday, I’d recommend taking the starter out the day before so you can give it a few feedings prior to baking bread. This will ensure you have an active, bubbly sourdough starter to work with when you go to bake.
Keeping Your Starter Clean
A successful sourdough starter will not only be active and bubbly but will be free of unwanted organisms like mold.
I highly recommend keeping you jar as clean as possible to deter mold build up. Do not let sourdough build up on the sides of the jar. Use a spatula to wipe down excess flour and water after every feeding.
Using Sourdough Discard
Sourdough discard is any leftover portion of your starter that you do not need to remain in the jar when feeding it.
For example, if your sourdough is flat but you have 200 grams of it in your jar, reduce that base amount to 100 grams before feeding. In this case you would have 100 grams of discard available.
You could throw this 100 grams of extra starter away or use it in amazing recipes like pancakes, chocolate chip cookies, brownies, or pumpkin muffins.
Sourdough discard does not have any wild yeast in it, so it lacks the ability to raise the dough. However, it gives your baked goods a tangy taste- a unique and irresistible flavor.
You can also create recipes that only use discard, and these homemade treats will retain the benefits of being easier to digest and more probiotic-rich.
Store discard in the refrigerator with a tight lid until ready to use.
Remember, some bakers keep just enough starter on hand to make the desired bread recipes, resulting in very little discard.
