There are several ways to keep a starter:

• a “wet” starter which is like a thin pancake batter
• a thicker pancake batter type
• a stiff starter that looks like a ball of dough

There are advantages to each but for our purposes, we’ll use the more common ‘thick pancake batter’ type. We’ll also be keeping it at what’s referred to in the bread world as “100% hydration” which simply means your starter (or dough) has 100% of the flour weight in water. If you use 163g of flour, you add 163g of atwer; if you use 47g flour, use 47g water. Your flour’s weight is always the base and your water is the percentage of that weight. You’ll possibly see other percentages like 65% hydration starters which are more dough-like since there’s only 65% of the flour weight in water, therefore less water than flour. I just wanted to touch on hydration percentages because it seems to pop up a lot in the bread world. But as I said, we’ll work with the more typical 100% hydration level.

Ok, so we have a live starter that’s bubbling and expanding to about twice or three times it’s volume on each feed. This can be a starter someone gave you already mixed and going or a starter you got in dried form that you’ve woken up. It may even be a home grown from scratch starter but in all cases, we’re assuming we have an active one.

So how do we feed it? We’re going to use a simple 30-60-60 formula for normal feeds. This will change when it comes time to bulk up your starter in preparation to adding it to actual bread but for normal feeds, it’s 30-60-60. What does that mean?

Simply, we’ll take 30g of the old starter and discard the rest (dont’ worry, there’s stuff you can do with it) then add 60g of lukewarm (85ºF) water, whisk it up, then add 60g UAP (Unbleached All Purpose), stir to get all the flour wet, then return to the jar. And that’s as ‘tricky’ as regular feeds get. Well, mostly.

If you plan on using your starter to make whole wheat loaves most of the time, you might want to use whole wheat flour instead of UAP in your feeding. Likewise if you make rye loaves or other types of bread. UAP flour is simply easily found, relatively inexpensive (even with flour prices rising, it’s usually still the most available). Sinse you’ll normally be using just 30g of your UAP starter to build up your actual bread starter, that amount is normally not going to affect your rye loaf anyway.

Let’s take a look at the process.

Clockwise, we have a scale, an “old starter” tub, small bowl, water at room temperature, about a half cup of unbleached all purpose flour, spoon, whisk and rubber spatula.

Step one:

Put the bowl on the scale and “tare” it, which means it sets the weight back to zero even though there’s something on the scale. This lets us measure ingredients as we’re adding them. If you have a mechanical/spring scale, just keep track of three numbers: 30 grams, 90 grams (30 + 60) and 150 grams (30 +60 + 60)

Step 2:

Add some of your previous starter to the bowl until you get 30 grams. Depending on if your yeastie beasties chowed the previous feed completely or were just finishing, your old starter may be quite runny or a bit gluey like ours here - our starter had peaked and was on it’s way back down but not entirely used up.

Step 3:

Pour the rest of your old starter into your old starter tub. This can be used to make pancakes, English Muffins, pizza dough or other breads. If you’ve already got plenty (like we do here) next time you could just put it in the recycle bin. It’s just a quarter cup of flour, nothing to get too upset about. Go and rinse out the jar in cool to warm water so it’s ready to take the fresh starter in a minute. It doesn’t need to be sanitized or scrubbed, just a decent rinse is fine.

Step 4:

Again we tare the scale back to zero and now add the room temp water, 60 grams. This is then whisked to mix the starter well until you have a bit of froth which adds some oxigen to the mix.

Step 5:

Once more we tare the scale back to zero and this time add our unbleached all-purpose flour until we have added 60 grams, then we take our spatula and stir the goo up. Note that it’s not 100% smooth which is fine, the yeast will take care of that while they’re chewing up their lunch.

Step 6:

Finally, we return the new starter to the jar, place the lid on (loosely, just to stop it from drying but still let it breathe). Note that we’ve marked the jar so we know where the starter level is. Once it’s doubled in amount as it eats, you’ll be able to tell how far up it’s gone. We’ve also put “30-60-60″ on the jar to remember we added 30 grams of old starter and 60 grams of water and flour. Now the jar is ready to be placed somewhere warm (21 - 27ºC, 70 - 85ºF) to feed and grow.

When you’ve been feeding your starter about every eight hours and can pretty much be certain it’s consistently performing and doubling or tripling in that eight hours, you can then consider putting the starter in the fridge. This slows the activity in the starter right down but does not stop it. So it may not seem very active while it’s in there but the beasties are still having extended midnight snacks and you need to feed it once a week. If you make bread each weekend, use that as your opportunity to feed and get a dough starter set up at the same time.

Let’s also talk terms a bit. The starter you keep either fed 2-3 times daily on the counter or weekly in the fridge is called your “mother” starter because it supplies you with children starters for your dough. This is your “go to” starter and you’ll want to see to it it keeps fed and well maintained.

If you go away for a week or two, it will survive ok in the fridge although it may develop a rather funky odour and build up some “hootch” - yes, hootch as in booze - which is an alcohol byproduct from your bacteria. A small amount of it can be stirred back into the batter, much of it you can pour off. It’s a natural process of the yeast/bacteria activity and isn’t harmful though it doesn’t taste good so don’t drink it. Even after just a week’s normal sitting in the fridge, you may see hootch developing. Don’t worry, that’s not bad. Just mix it back in and do your regular feed.

How often to feed? If your starter is very active, every 8 hours may not be a bad schedule although 12 is OK as well. Don’t starve your starter, it’s still a living community of critters and they want to eat or they’ll begin to die off.

If you forget and the starter rises to double or triple, then recedes to it’s original amout and then stays that way (hungry) for a long stretch of time, you can probably still revive it by pulling out a tablespoon or two (15-30g) and giving it a standard feed (30-60-60). If it’s been starving for a while, feed it on a 12 hour cycle for a couple rounds so that it has time to re-populate the new batter mix. Once it starts to look active again, switch back to 8-hour feeds for a couple of cycles and once it’s looking back to heath, it is ready to make bread and/or go back in the fridge and eat once a week.

I’m likely leaving a few points out of the descriptions here so don’t hesitate to ask questions about regular feeds in the comments if there’s stuff that need clearing up. if I don’t know, I’ll hapilly research and post back.

CLEANUP TIP: When feeding or working with sourdough starter, try to put your tools into cool water as soon as you’re done with them since dried flour/water paste is a MAJOR PAIN to get off things. It IS used as glue, after all.