How to feed a sourdough starter
If you’re actively using your starter to make our Sourdough Bread recipe, the instructions above will allow just enough leftover sourdough starter to have enough starter for the next day’s bread. If you’re not making bread every few days, you’ll need to discard excess starter as part of the feeding process to keep it healthy and happy. In order to have bread on the regular, you have to learn to feed sourdough starter to keep it happy and healthy. Here’s how to feed sourdough starter, including storing and maintaining sourdough starter, and how to tell if sourdough starter is bad. But if you don’t already have a sourdough starter, did you know you can make it at home? Here’s our guide on how to make sourdough starter, complete with all our tips. You also can get a sourdough starter from a friend or purchase it online. Making sourdough starter takes very little hands on time: and just 5 days of waiting before the starter is active and ready to go. You’ll want to store your starter in the refrigerator until you’re ready to make bread. When you make bread, you’ll feed the sourdough starter the night before (see the recipe below), then return the sourdough starter to the refrigerator until you’re ready to bake again.
Troubleshooting your sourdough starter
A healthy starter smells funky and fruity, in a good way. It’s a floury paste that’s lightly bubbly. But every once in a while, something can go wrong with your starter. If you don’t feed it often enough, the sourdough starter starts to smell like alcohol. You may also find that the starter loses its vibrancy and doesn’t get too bubbly and active after a feeding.
You can leave the starter in the refrigerator for 3 to 4 days at a time between feedings. We recommend feeding sourdough starter at least twice a week for best results. Remember, if you’re planning to make bread on a given day, you’ll feed sourdough starter the night before you bake. So depending on how often you want to make bread, you may end up feeding your starter more often. For us, we make a loaf of sourdough bread about 4 times a week, so we feed it 4 times per week (every night before we make bread). If we have a week where we plan to make less bread, we’ll still feed the starter 2 times per week, regardless of whether we’re making bread.
Don’t worry, you can always get the starter to recover. Throw away all but about a teaspoon of the starter and nurse it back to life following the instructions for making a sourdough starter. It should take 5 days or less to be healthy again.
Related posts
This post is one of three in our series on making sourdough bread: Of course if you have a friend or family member who can babysit your sourdough starter, that’s even better! Actually, in Sweden you can hire a babysitter for your sourdough starter. So maybe it’s not so far fetched!
How to Make Sourdough Bread: The Simplified Guide How to Make a Sourdough Starter
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