Maintaining Your Sourdough Starter
- Yeast On East
- Apr 26
- 3 min read
Sourdough is both rewarding when you get it right and frustrating when something looks a bit off. Either way, most of the reactions I get from people who try my sourdough are mostly positive. The next thing I hear is, “How do you maintain it? I heard you have to feed it every day? It seems very troublesome”.
The truth is, it takes 2 minutes each week.
The following is a simple guide gathered from my personal experience while enabling me to live my normal life. The assumption is either you have created a sourdough starter and you’re roughly on day 7 in the whole journey or an enthusiastic friend has given you their baby (sourdough starter), let’s call him Barry.
When starting my sourdough journey, one of the areas I struggled with was how to maintain the starter when I wasn’t using it. I thought everyone had to maintain a large tub of starter and always feeding it with the same amount of flour I used when I was baking.
As it turns out, all I had to do was reduce the portion.
To start, take Barry or any leftover sourdough starter discard from your levain, poolish, or even instant yeast mixture — this will be your base to maintain your sourdough starter. A little as 2 grams is more than enough to maintain your starter for up to a week before your next bake.
In most refrigerators, the temperature is around 3–4 Celcius. The low temperature allows the yeast colony multiplying slower thereby giving you time back for your daily needs. Think of the magical process of retard proofing after the bulk proof. Slowing the process gives the dough more time to develop the complex flavours.
A side note, and a quick introduction to baker’s percentage (mainly for those that don’t know, you can skip this part if you’re familiar with this). You’d be surprised how amazing this method is and can be reused for all your recipes when you're thinking about the portions of ingredients.
Simply put, baker’s percentage is the percentage of each ingredient with respect to the total weight of a base ingredient — which is flour for us.
For example, the below recipe to maintain your starter will include
20g of flour (100%)
25 of water (125%)
5g of starter or discard starter (25%)
The concept of baker’s percentage continues when preparing our sourdough recipe. For example:
550g of flour (100%)
412.5g of water (75%, also known as 75% hydration)
110g of starter (20%)
11g of salt (2%)
Please note, adding up all the weight of the ingredients won’t give you 100% — it’s not supposed to.
After following the recipe and placing the starter in the fridge, there should be some funk, similar to vinegar but should not smell pungent or repulsive. If it smells like something died then you may need to start the starter from scratch or phone your trusted friend. If there are any colours that look awfully brown or black then that’s another sign to start again.
General rule, keep it up to a week.
A few nifty tricks that I learned along the way
Place a rubber band around the jar near where the top of the starter is. The general rule is that once doubled, it’s close to ready for another feeding
Use masking tape and write down the last feed
To maintain your starter when you’re not baking, find a small jar with a good open top so that you can easily pour in water, fit a tablespoon and be able to see what stage the starter is at
To use the starter for baking
Simply take the steps above but scale the ingredients to your recipe
Rather than placing the starter in the fridge, simply leave it on a countertop between 8 to 12 hours, depending on your temperature. If I’m baking the next day from 11 am-12 pm, I usually prepare the starter in the evening e.g. 11 pm.
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