Feeding Your Starter

This is where you may have been intimidated to start your sourdough journey. You're thinking to yourself, "I can't even keep my plants alive, how am I supposed to keep a sourdough starter alive?!" Don't fret. It's easy and, quite frankly, hard to kill once it's established.

On our Instagram page, we have a sourdough highlight that goes through how to feed your starter!

Supplies You'll Need

  • Food scale
  • Jar (these are my favorite jars for sourdough)
  • All-purpose flour
  • Water
  • Your starter

Feeding Your Starter

  1. Take out your starter
  2. Take out a clean jar
  3. In the clean jar, measure...
    • 10 grams of your starter (there will be starter left over – we’ll talk about what to do with that later)
    • 50 grams of water, and
    • 50 grams of all-purpose flour.
  4. Mix!
  5. The mixture will be lumpy and kind of thick, it doesn’t need to be perfectly mixed. This is your fed starter!
  6. Leave your fed starter to sit on the counter or somewhere warm. Over the course of about 6-10 hours, it will double in volume and get bubbly.
  7. If you’re not going to bake with your starter within 24-48 hours, put your new starter back in the fridge.

Now let's talk about what to do with the leftover starter. This is called discard. You have to choices.

  1. Put it into a larger jar and continue to add discard to this jar after each time you feed your starter. This jar becomes your discard jar. You can use sourdough discard in so many delicious recipes! Pizza crust, cinnamon rolls, waffles, etc. Just Google sourdough discard recipes!
  2. If you dont want to keep a discard jar, you can compost your discard.