What To Do With Your New Sourdough Starter

Here’s your ultimate beginner’s guide for what to do with your sourdough starter now that you have one.

Whether you were given your sourdough starter by a friend or started your own, you might be thinking, “Now what?”

That’s certainly how I felt in the beginning.

If you don’t remember anything else from this post, remember this; people have been using wild yeast to leaven bread for thousands of years. It doesn’t have to be complicated, just don’t give up.

Related: Check out more sourdough ideas here.

What Is Wild Yeast?

It’s a fungus, technically speaking.

Unlike “domesticated” yeast (grown by humans in huge vats, fed with sugar, separated via centrifuge, frozen, dehydrated and packaged), wild yeast grows all around us and reproduces naturally.

Baker’s yeast does the job very fast and typically with consistent results, but as you can imagine, the health benefits are inferior to that of wild yeast.

The goal is to capture the wild yeast in the air in order to start your sourdough starter, then allow it to continually reproduce by feeding it flour and water.

Caring For Your Sourdough Starter

Care for your starter, in its most basic form, is feeding it flour and water.

There are ways to get more technical with this, like a certain hydration level, or weighing your starter before feeding it to inform exactly how much flour to give it. But I like to keep things simple.

Generally speaking, you can look at your starter and eyeball how much is in there (1/4 cup, 1/2 cup, etc.) and feed it that same amount of water and flour combined, or more.

For instance, if you have 1/2 cup of starter in your jar that needs fed (i.e., it isn’t active or it’s been in your fridge a while), you’d give it at least 1/4 cup flour and 1/4 water to give it that 1/2 cup combined.

It’s important to use unbleached flour and filtered water so as not to kill off the wild yeast.

I also recommend using a Weck or mason jar; something you can see into with a wide mouth for easy pouring and stirring.

How Often To Feed Sourdough Starter

Take comfort in the fact that there is so much flexibility here.

To keep your starter healthy and thriving it’s generally a good idea to feed it about every 24 hours if you keep it out on your counter. But if you go longer than that, it’s really ok.

Keep in mind that your starter isn’t actually a living thing, it’s an ecosystem. The wild yeast are the living things. And those wild yeast are always changing.

As you use starter in your recipes and add new flour and water into it, those wild yeast are being replaced. So you essentially have a totally new starter every few months or so.

The reason I bring this up is to remind you that this thing is always in flux. We don’t want to neglect our starters because it will be hard to get consistent results. But whether you feed your starter every 12 hours like clock work or miss some feeds here and there, stick it in the fridge off and on, and so on, that doesn’t mean yours will be more “unhealthy” overall.

To boil it down, your starter is generally as healthy as its last several feeds, not its total life up until now. So how often should you feed it? As often as you need it for a recipe.

A good rule of thumb that you can totally deviate from if you need to, is every 24 hours at room temp and every week in the fridge.

When In Doubt, Use The Fridge

If you know you won’t be using your starter, or you know it needs fed but don’t want to right then, stick it in the fridge.

This slows the activity in your starter down and keeps the wild yeast and bacteria from getting as “hungry”.

(By the way, this rule also applies to your sourdough bakes. If the timing of sourdough recipes seems tricky and you avoid starting a loaf because you’re not sure you can get the schedule just right, remember you can always stick your dough covered in the fridge!)

I keep a back-up jar of a little bit of starter in my fridge that I honestly leave for weeks at a time, pull out and bring to room temp, feed a couple of times, then return to the fridge. That way if anything crazy were to happen to my main starter, I’d have another ready to go.

I usually like to keep mine on the counter and keep it pretty active so I can whip something up without a lot of notice. But plenty of people utilize the fridge and do their baking once or twice a week!

Do I Need To Discard?

Only if you don’t want to feed the starter the amount it would need, or if your discard is several days old and you’d like to refresh it.

What I mean by that is, there are times when it’s a good idea to discard, but usually it’s not necessary.

Sometimes my starter jar will get pretty full; maybe I didn’t get to a recipe when I thought I would.

In those instances, you can use up your discard with a discard recipe (which I definitely recommend!), or throw it out or compost it.

Sometimes if I’ve left mine on the counter for 2 or 3 days, I like to discard to get it down to just a tablespoon or so of starter, and add 2 tablespoons each of flour and water, then feed it again about 12 hours later, 1/4 cup each of flour and water.

After a couple of days, your discard will start being very sour and you might not want to use it in a recipe, and that’s when it’s a good idea to discard.

My Sourdough Starter Is Turning Grey!

Don’t panic, and don’t throw it out.

The liquid that forms on top of your starter is called “hooch” and it can turn orange-ish or even dark gray. This means your starter is very hungry!

You do not need to start over, and it will not hurt you. You just need to give it a good refresh.

Discard almost all of it, add 2 tablespoons each water and flour, wait several hours or overnight, and feed 1/4 cup flour and water. You might need to discard once more and feed once more. Just pay attention to how active it’s getting a few hours after you feed it.

You’ll also want to keep it in a warm place if you can. A cooler kitchen will slow your starter’s recovery.

How Do I Know When My Starter Is Ready To Add To A Recipe?

You want to try to add starter into the recipe at its peak. It will be very bubbly, often with holes all throughout it and should double in size.

It might not fully double, especially if it isn’t very warm in your house.

One thing to look for is a trail going down the jar, meaning your starter is receding. Try to add it to your recipe before that, when it’s very bubbly and doubled or almost doubled.

You can use a dry-erase marker or even a rubber band on the outside of your jar to mark it’s starting level and watch for that doubling.

Signs that your starter is ready to use include:

• Full of tiny bubbles
• Spongey texture
• Sour, but not unpleasant, smell
• Slight fizzing or popping sound (think very quiet Rice Krispies cereal sounds)
• Doubled or nearly doubled in size
• Slightly bumpy and uneven on top (inactive starter will go flat)
• No trail going down the jar (meaning your starter is receding and flattening out)

If you have at least a few of these signs, your starter should be at peak!

Recipes For Using Discard

If you’ve given your starter a big feed and have lots of leftover inactive starter (discard), you don’t have to let it go to waste. There are plenty of recipes out there that don’t require active starter. Instead, you’re basically replacing some of the flour and liquid in the recipe with already fermented flour. So you’re not only saving something from going to waste but also adding in some of those sourdough benefits, even without fully fermenting it.

Here’s a list of some of my favorite recipes that utilize sourdough discard.

One Last Note

If your starter is very new and immature, you might not get amazing results in things like artisan loaves or sandwich breads.

Did you know you can use a little baker’s yeast to supplement your sourdough recipes as you wait for your starter to mature?

Anja from Our Gabled Home suggests using a teaspoon per bread loaf recipe.

Sourdough certainly takes patience, trial and error. But it is so rewarding if you stick with it!

I hope you found these tips helpful and realistic. The last thing I want is for sourdough to seem overwhelming. I truly believe anyone could do it and find it makes their lives better.

Thanks so much for reading.

-Tara

Try my Best Sourdough Tuxedo Muffins here.

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