Before you watch this video on sourdough starter maintenance, please know that it really isn’t a big deal to keep your sourdough culture alive and healthy. A good starter is naturally very hearty and robust. If I were as strong as my starter is, I’d be competing in Iron Man competitions. At a minimum, all you have to do is throw some flour and water in once in a while to keep it alive during periods when you’re baking infrequently. To keep it near optimum health, feed it once a week or so and keep it refrigerated.
If you’re baking regularly, say weekly or bi-weekly, it’s easy enough just to feed it after using the amount called for in your recipe before returning it to your refrigerator. If you really want to be sure your starter is in optimum shape, feed it once or twice the day before baking or the two days prior to baking day. In addition, here are a few points that are worth noting…
- When you feed your starter, feed it with approximately equal weights of flour and water. That equates to about 2/3 to 3/4 cup of water for every cup of flour.
- As a general rule of thumb, the amount you feed your sourdough starter depends on how much of it you have to start with. When practical, you want to approximately double the amount of starter you have each time you feed it. However, if you already have a couple cups of starter on hand and typically only use a cup of starter in your recipe, it doesn’t make sense to have to double the existing two cups of starter. In this case just dispose of a cup or more of the starter and then double what remains.
- If it’s been a long time since you’ve fed your starter and you don’t plan on baking for a while, don’t feel like you have to go through a big rigamarole to keep it happy, just stir in a 1/2 cup of flour and about the same amount of water and forget about it. That will at least buy you a few more weeks before you have to worry about it again.
- If you really don’t think you’re going to use your starter at all for a very long time, (some people don’t bake during the summer months, for example), you could dry some starter and freeze it. It will store this way indefinitely. Then revive it in the fall. See the videos on drying starter and reviving dried starter.
- If you need a whole wheat or rye starter, it’s easy to convert your white flour starter by just a few successive feedings with the flour you want. You may have to adjust the water as some flours are thirstier than others.
- Be sure to store your starter in a container that’s not air tight. This comment from Madelyn dramatically (and humorously) illustrates why.
I’m really belaboring this subject. Once you’ve played around with sourdough starters for a while and baked some with it, you’ll know all you need to know and develop a sense for what works best. If your bread is not rising as much as you think it should (you’re not getting the desired oven spring) then try what I said about feeding your starter a couple of times in the 12-24 hours before starting your recipe.
As with anything on this web site, if you have any questions or comments about anything please ask in the space below.
Jan 13, 2011 Update: In this video I mention a favorite recipe of mine that calls for 2 cups of sourdough starter. It’s been so long since I shot the video (and many favorite recipes ago), that I’ve forgotten exactly which recipe I was referring to. I do know it was in Ed Wood’s book, Classic Sourdoughs. He has many recipes in there that call for 2 cups of starter.
Managing Your Sourdough Starter
About the author
Eric: Founder, proprietor, and Grand Poobah of Breadtopia. Bread baking fanatic.
Morgan 
Liza Saturley 
Is it okay if I leave my starter in room temperature all the time as long as i feed it once a day?
Yes. Some bakeries do it that way since they're using it daily. But it can be a little tricky unless you are using it to bake daily. If you're not drawing from it daily then just a little bit of feeding probably won't be enough and the right amount of feeding may result in you ending up with a ton of starter before long. It may just take some experimenting to find a routine that works for you and your starter.
I returned from vacation the other day and when I took my starter out of the fridge to feed it the top 1/2" had turned an unhealthy-looking bluish-grey color. Rather alarming! I skimmed the discolored portion off and fed the starter as usual, but is it safe to use...?
You did just the right thing. You might want to feed it once more now just for good measure, if you haven't already. Your experience isn't unusual and your starter will be fine. Not unsafe to use.
I would like to give a friend some starter but have a couple questions. .. 1. should I feed my starter before I give it to her, or give her the cup unfed for her to feed? 2. If I do not feed it before I give it to her, how soon should she feed it? 3.Should she let it sit on the counter to bubble up before storing in fridge? 4.Lastly, I had read that a thinner starter will have a more sour flavor, is this true?
There's probably no need to keep that much starter on hand unless you plan on starting a bakery. Since most sourdough recipes only call for a relatively small amount of starter, you might want to toss all but a couple cups at most. Besides taking up less space, you won't have to feed it as much to keep it healthy. Here's a page on sourdough starter management that might be helpful: http://breadtopia.com/sourdough-starter-management/, but the really rough answer to your question is feed it at least once a week and at least double it each time you feed it. That's why if you're not using it enough, you'll need to toss some periodically in order to keep the quantity manageable.
Actually, once you have an active sourdough culture going, what people call "feeding" might be better thought of as "inoculating". Rather than thinking of feeding your starter, think in terms of using your active starter to inoculate a fresh flour and water mix with the yeast and bacteria that make up your active starter. What this means in practice is that you can (should) discard (or otherwise use - say to make sourdough pancakes or something) most of your existing starter when you "feed". To use your numbers, and give you a pragmatic example of what I mean, try this: in a new container (separate from your existing starter), combine 350g of flour and 350g of (dechlorinated) water and mix half a teaspoon of your active starter in with them. Mix well and leave that on the counter for 8 hours and see what happens.
Here's one recipe from Eric: http://breadtopia.com/sourdough-waffles-and-pancakes/
You could also google something like "discard sourdough starter pancakes" and find a bunch more.
I've played around with using a lot of different types of flour to create different starters and there is definitely a big difference from one to another. For instance, lately I have been using whole rye flour to create the starter I use for most of my loaves. I've found that the whole rye gets very sour, very quickly. In general, I've found that whole grains tend toward a more sour smell and taste than high extraction flours and white flour tends to stay quite sweet for a long time. I'm thinking that the bran and/or germ in the whole grains must be promoting the growth of lactobacillus in the culture. In my experiments, I've not run across any flour that made the starter massively less active like you are describing, but who knows?
I keep a small container of starter that I feed weekly in the fridge with the Breadtopia organic white bread flour. Then the night before I am going to bake, I take a teaspoon out of that starter and mix well with some kind of flour (usually a whole grain or high extract, and lately, whole rye) and water in another container and leave it out overnight. If you have any other flour besides the whole foods APF, it might be worth trying some experiments like that with different kinds of flour to see if any of them give you more activity (and/or other characteristics that you enjoy).
First, When I feed my as in the video it will after some time grow in volume, (as in the video), but then it will shrink back down again is this normal? This was not discussed in the video.
Yes. Totally normal. The activity of fermentation is vigorous after a good feeding. Fermentation creates gas bubbles which causes the rise. As the yeast starts to exhaust its food supply (flour) that activity subsides and it will drop back down.
Second, At room temperature, is there a rule of thumb for how long a healthy Starter should take to swell after it's been feed?
I suppose there is. My healthy starter will pretty much always start to rise noticeably within a couple or maybe a few hours of feeding. I think it has usually dropped back down somewhere in the 12-18 range. Not too sure of the timing, never really kept that close track.
Third, How was Starter maintained in the past prior to refrigeration?
The only old accounts I've ever read have the "old sourdoughs" (gold miners) keeping starter in a leather pouch around their neck. I can only guess that they had to feed their cultures fairly frequently to keep them happy. Even now, some bakeries that go through large volumes of starter on a daily basis will not refrigerate it. Since they're having to replenish it (feed it) very frequently, refrigeration isn't necessary.
Fourth, Should the Starter's container be sealed or unsealed?
Should not be in an air tight container. A smidgen of air passage is all that's necessary though. A loose fitting lid does the trick.