How to maintain sourdough starter

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New to sourdough baking? Here's all you need to know about maintaining sourdough starter and what to do with your sourdough starter discard.

So you've decided to start baking sourdough bread.

Welcome to the dark side! We have cookies...and Sourdough Gingerbread.

You might be wondering what exactly you've gotten yourself into? Maybe you've heard the term "sourdough starter discard" and have wondered what that meant.

Or perhaps you've heard about the need to "feed your starter." What, like a baby?

In a word, yes.

I've been maintaining my sourdough starter for years, and I'm here to give you an easy-to-follow guide to baking with sourdough starter.

Let's have at it, shall we?

Jump to:

• It's all about the yeast
• What is sourdough starter?
• How to maintain sourdough starter
• How to use the sourdough starter discard
• Measure your ingredients carefully
• Questions asked and answered
• Further reading about sourdough
• Recipes using sourdough starter discard
• Sourdough Starter Maintenance
• Recipe
• Comments

It's all about the yeast

Any story about sourdough starter has to...uhm...start with yeast. They're a living organism that occurs naturally in the environment.

While the commercial yeast you buy in the store (i.e., baker’s yeast) has been “domesticated,” yeast in the wild varies by location.

Long ago people learned to capture the yeast and nurture it, feeding it flour and water to create a bubbly living starter, and then used bits of that starter in their bread.

If you want to bake bread without commercial yeast, you'll need to use the wild yeast in sourdough starter.

What is sourdough starter?

The tangy character of sourdough bread comes from the yeast that had been captured from the local environment at a point in time. Some sourdough starters available today are descended from a starter more than a century old.

And as that starter is fed and used, it adapts itself to the local region and climate, creating a bread that is unique. That’s the reason San Francisco sourdough bread is so distinctive.

Most sourdough starters have a recipe ratio of 1 to 1 flour and water by weight. In other words, it's 50% flour and 50% water. You can also say that the flour has a 100% hydration level.

I say "most" because you can have different hydration levels in a starter based on baker preference or the flour itself.

You can use different types of flours for different types of sourdough starter. I use King Arthur Baking's unbleached all-purpose flour to maintain my starter, which has a higher protein level than most all-purpose flours. You can also use whole wheat flour, rye flour, bread flour, etc, as your flour of choice. Just be consistent and use the same type each time, if possible.

Since my sourdough starter has that 1 to 1 ratio, that's what I'm going to stick to for the purposes of this discussion. Your mileage may vary.

How to maintain sourdough starter

So as we said earlier, yeast is a living thing. In order to keep the yeast alive in the starter, you have to feed them. Our baking ancestors didn't know that it was yeast that made their bread rise, but they did know that if they didn't tend to their starter, their bread would be more like a doorstop.

Dead yeast does that.

There are two ways of feeding sourdough starter. Actually there's just one way to feed the starter, it's how often you feed it that will alter the method slightly.

The frequency you choose will depend on how often you plan to bake with your starter.

Method 1: Daily feeding

If you're going to be baking with sourdough starter frequently, then you can keep it on your counter in a warm place. The yeast will continue to feed on the starches in the flour, so a daily feeding will be necessary.

Even if you keep your starter on the counter, you'll still want to make sure it's fed before using it for bread. Just factor about 2 hours of resting time after feeding before you start your sourdough bread dough. And don't forget to replenish the crock with more flour and water to make up for what you've just taken.

Method 2: Weekly feeding

I don't bake sourdough bread very often but I still have to keep my starter alive, so I maintain my sourdough starter by storing it in the refrigerator. Think of it like putting the yeast into suspended animation.

When I go to feed the cold starter, I'm basically waking up the yeast.

So after feeding, the starter needs to sit on the counter for 2 to 4 hours to ensure that the yeast is active. You'll know because the starter will be bubbly with a nice yeasty smell, and will have risen up in the container.

At this point you have a "fed sourdough starter". If you're going to bake with it now, just remove the amount you need and repeat the feeding process to replace what you've taken.

If you're not going to use the starter now, return it to the refrigerator until the next feeding time.

By the way, be sure to hit SUBSCRIBE in the menu above to receive my recipe for Extra-Tangy Sourdough Bread using just fed sourdough starter (no commercial yeast).

Such tangy goodness, I can't even.

How to use the sourdough starter discard

You'll notice that the first thing you do when feeding sourdough starter is that you remove some. Why?

Well, if you don't, the starter will grow to the point it will take over a small city.

(Oh no! The starter that ate Cincinnati!)

The starter that you remove before feeding is the "unfed sourdough starter" (aka sourdough starter discard).

Some people choose to throw away the starter (hence the term "discard"). I don’t like to waste anything, and this is where creativity comes in to it.

I've developed many ideas that use the unfed starter, like bagels, pretzels, shortcrust pastry, and pizza dough. Plus there are sweet pastries like pumpkin cake, banana bread, and the aforementioned gingerbread.

Or, simply give your discard to a friend so they can create their own starter!

Measure your ingredients carefully

Please note the emphasis on the words by weight when I talked about what sourdough starter is. If you were to mix one cup of flour and one cup of water, you'd have a much different ratio.

Why? Because a cup of flour weighs 120 grams (about 4¼ ounces), while a cup of water weights 227 grams (8 ounces). So that volume measurement of flour to water would be closer to 1 to 2 flour to water, or a hydration level of 53%. That changes things significantly!

The best thing to do is to get yourself a kitchen scale. I use mine constantly. It’s much more accurate than using volume measurements because the weight of one person’s lightly sifted cup of flour can differ significantly from another’s packed cup of flour.

It's also helpful to have a digital thermometer to check the water temperature before you go adding it to the unfed starter, especially when you're just starting out. A good temperature range is about 100 to 120°F.

If the water is too cold, the yeast will be sluggish and won't rise well. Too hot, and you've just killed the yeast you've been trying to nurture!

Questions asked and answered

Here are some other questions that you might have about the care and feeding of sourdough starter...

Further reading about sourdough

I've only covered the basics of maintaining a healthy sourdough starter for baking sourdough bread, but there's so much more to know.

I love King Arthur Baking as a resource, and they have a wonderful Sourdough Baking Guide that goes into much more depth than I have here. Peruse at your leisure.

Sourdough starter does require some love and attention, but you will be rewarded with baked goods that reflect your unique baking style and environment.

Welcome to the wonderful world of sourdough!

Sourdough Starter Maintenance

Here's all you need to know about feeding your sourdough starter. Whether you're new to sourdough or just need a refresher, this is the place to start!

Recipe