Sourdough Starter Maintenance For Beginners and Busy Folks

In this post I discuss how to maintain a sourdough starter and address questions about transitioning your starter to fresh milled flour.

You’ve been carefully growing your sourdough starter for days or even weeks. It’s your baby! But like with any other type of baby, caring it can sometimes feel overwhelming and not always intuitive at first. Today, I am going to share with you some basic principals for caring for your sourdough starter. Before you know it, feeding and caring for your sourdough baby will be easy peasy.

Keeping your Sourdough Baby Happy and Healthy

There are several different approaches to maintaining a healthy sourdough starter. Like other living things, there often isn’t just one way to care for it. Many different paths will lead you to the same end; a beautiful loaf of sourdough bread. I will share with you some different feeding methods (including what I personally do as a busy mom of 13) and you can see which one best fits your lifestyle and schedule.

A quick note on ratios:

When growing a sourdough starter, it is often recommended to feed it with a ratio of 1 part starter, 1 part flour, 1 part water or 1:1:1 in sourdough shorthand. These parts could be in grams or in volume measurements such as cups or tablespoons. 

My personal preference is to weigh my ingredients. 100 grams of flour is always 100 grams. The weight of 1 cup of flour can vary greatly depending on how it was measured. Weighing it just simplifies things.

On methods…

Twice Daily

The twice daily method is as simple as it sounds! You are feeding your sourdough starter twice daily with just enough flour and water so that it has peaked and is ready for its next feeding about 12 hours later. Typically this is done at a 1:5:5 ratio, discarding the remaining starter (don’t throw this away! Store it in a jar in your fridge until you’re ready to explore the many ways to use sourdough discard!). This typically gives your starter’s bacteria just enough food to eat through before it’s ready for its next feeding. 

Once Daily

Only slightly different than the previous method. You are feeding your sourdough starter once daily with just enough flour and water so that it has peaked and is ready for its next feeding about 24 hours later. I have found a good ratio for this is the 1:10:10 ratio.

Both of the above methods lend themselves to having a very robust colony of yeastie beasties to leaven and ferment your bread. They do, however, require you to maintain your starter more frequently which can be a challenge if you’re a busy person!

This is where convenience comes in. As a busy mama to my big family I need things to be easy or they just don’t happen.

Once or Twice a Week

I use this method most frequently. I feed my starter a 1:10:10 ratio at night before bed or in the morning when I get up, and then 10-12 hours later when it has doubled, I pop it in the fridge. If I plan to bake with it throughout the week, I make quite a large amount of starter (typically up to 800 grams at a time). When I am ready to bake, I pull it out of the fridge and use it straight in any recipe calling for “active” starter. This method is quite convenient and has worked well for me. My starter remains robust and not too sour. Over-souring can occur if you do not give your starter a high ratio feeding before storing it in the fridge.

What if I need a break from using my sourdough starter?

Sometimes you just want a break from your sourdough starter. Life gets too busy, you get sick, you’re going on vacation. Then what do you do?

You can place your starter into a more dormant state by creating a dry starter. I learned about this method from Anja from Our Gabled Home. Here are the very simple steps.

1. In a small bowl, add about 2 tbsp sourdough starter.
2. Add flour to your starter until your starter becomes nearly impossible to stir.
3. Then add a little more flour and knead it like a small loaf of bread.
4. Add a little more flour to it – it should be very dry and not stick to you at all.
5. Put 1-2 tbsp of flour into the bottom of a glass jar and place your very dry ball of sourdough starter on top of it.
6. Add about 2 tbsp of flour on top of your ball of sourdough starter and press it down.
7. Add a lid and pop it in your fridge!

A dry starter will last several weeks or perhaps even months. When you are ready to bake with this starter again, pull it out of the fridge the night before and add enough water to make a thick pancake batter like consistency. It will be ready to go by the next day. If it has sat an exceptionally long time (more than a month), you may want to feed it for 2-3 days before using it to help wake it up and reduce any excessive lactic acid build up that might cause your bread to be very sour, unless of course that’s what you are going for!

Freshly Milled Flour and Other Questions

How do I transition my sourdough starter to fresh milled flour?

It was a super simple process for me. When I began my sourdough journey, I fed my starter with unbleached all purpose flour. Then I transitioned to half whole wheat flour and half unbleached all purpose flour, per the Tartine Method by Chad Robertson and I was super happy with this. I rediscovered the amazing benefits of fresh milled flour shortly after, and I desired to use only fresh milled flour for all our baked goods… so that is what I did! I simply started feeding my sourdough starter with fresh milled hard white wheat flour.

Some people take a more conservative approach and transition their starter over gradually, but I believe if your starter is firmly established already (6 or more months old), you should be able to just start feeding your starter with fresh milled flour without any transition period.

That being said, if you are accustomed to working with all purpose flour, you may find it helpful to transition slowly. Try 50% fresh milled flour and 50% all purpose flour to start with because they do look and act very differently and you may want the transition time to adjust to using fresh milled whole grain flour.

What are some differences between a fresh milled flour and an all purpose flour sourdough starter?

The first difference you will notice when transitioning your starter to fresh milled flour is your starter will be thicker and your bubble won’t be quite as big. Also, whole grain flour from the store absorbs more water, and fresh milled flour is even more thirsty. So when your starter seems to be quite thick, don’t be alarmed!

Fresh milled flour also ferments more quickly. If you are not already feeding your starter with a high ratio of flour and water to starter, you will want to start doing so or you may end up with a very SOUR starter. This is a common complaint, but I’ll address that later.

Does it matter what type of flour I use to feed my starter?

Not really. It is mostly personal preference. I stick with spelt or hard white flour to feed my starter because they are neutral in flavor and can be used with many different types of recipes. Some find that rye flour produces a very robust starter. Try out different types of flour and find which one works well for you!

How can I tell if my sourdough starter is ready to be fed again?

This question might be best answered by telling you a bit about how a sourdough starter works. The yeastie beasties that you are lovingly caring for do many things to the flour. It begins by feeding on the starches that are present in the flour, and as a by-product, they produce carbon dioxide that not only provides the gases that make your dough rise, but also helps preserve the oxygen sensitive nutrients that are found in freshly milled flour, such as the vitamin E. The longer the sourdough culture is left to work on the dough, the further broken down the starches will become. 

A sourdough starter that is at its peak and is ready to use will still have a lot of elasticity. It will also have a somewhat “goopy” texture. A starter that is past its peak and ready to be fed again will have a more runny texture with less elasticity because it has broken down much of the starchy substances that hold the dough together and give it its strength. When your starter has turned somewhat runny, that is the ideal time to feed it. 

If you let it go a while *after* it has reached this state (people often say this is when your starter is “hungry”) the lactic acid producing bacteria in your starter will become more active and make your starter much more sour. Repeatedly letting your starter go hungry will cause the lactic acid producing bacteria to become more dominant and produce a much more sour bread. If this is what you want, great! 

What if my sourdough starter is too sour?

If you want to enjoy the benefits of sourdough without very sour bread, you will want to stay on top of feeding your sourdough starter. This helps maintain a good balance of bacteria. But let’s say you let your starter go hungry one too many times and now it is very very sour. What do you do now?

You have two options:

• Start a new sourdough starter and don’t let it go hungry (this is the more time consuming option)
  

OR

• Feed your sourdough starter at a very high ratio for several feedings and don’t let it get “hungry”. 

High ratio feedings to refresh a very sour starter

What do I do with all this sourdough discard??

One of the best things I discovered in my later years of maintaining a sourdough starter is how to to keep it small, leaving me with very little discard. When feeding it, you do not to feed it large amounts of flour. I have done as small as 2 grams of starter, to 20 grams of water and 20 grams of water. This works very well when I am not actively baking with my starter.

Let’s get baking!

Now that you know how to keep your sourdough starter happy, it’s time to put it to use! Keep feeding it, experimenting with recipes, and don’t be afraid to make mistakes—each recipe teaches you something new. What’s the first thing you’ll bake? Got any questions about starters? Let me know in the comments!