A Week in the Life of a Sourdough Culture

There are as many ways to care for a sourdough culture as there are keepers of sourdough cultures. This is how I maintain and use mine. I wrote instructions to days of the week so you can see the flow. There are so many variables (when you want to make bread, how quickly you use up the bread and need to make more, how much starter you need to make the amount of bread you need, temperatures...), it can get confusing to talk about all of the "if" situations. So here is what I did this week with my culture.

Tuesday morning: I fed the culture but did not need to make bread. Take equal parts starter, whole wheat flour, and water. Mix together, stirring in plenty of air, until there are no dry pockets of flour. I like to keep about 3 oz starter and feed it 3 oz flour and 3 oz water by weight. Any starter I have in excess of 3 oz, I put in a separate jar to use for muffins, English muffins, etc.

Tuesday evening: Starter had bubbled up nicely. I put it in the fridge.

Thursday morning: I was sharing starter, so I did the same feeding steps from Tuesday morning. The excess went in a jar to give away. I fed both my starter and the excess (so that it would be fed for the person receiving it). 

Thursday evening: Starter had bubbled up nicely. I will be baking bread tomorrow, so I measured out what I needed to make sandwich bread, kneading it into flour and water to soak overnight. I fed the remaining starter.

Friday morning: Place starter in the fridge. Make the overnight soaked bowls into bread.

I like letting my starter bubble, or proof, before putting it in the fridge. Room temperatures favor yeast. Fridge temperatures favor bacteria (the good kind -- probiotics). Both are wonderful, health-wise. The yeast gives a sweeter flavor, the bacteria the characteristic "sour" in sourdough.

I leave my starter in the fridge most of the time. I like to feed it two or three times before making bread to rejuvenate the culture. This is just my flavor preference. Plus those extra feedings give me "discard" for making English muffins, waffles, and muffins. 

So to sum up the basic steps: fridge when you want to forget about it for a while; when it's on the counter, feed once a day (in the current winter weather; in summer I had to feed twice a day) for a couple of days, and then make bread, feed culture, back to the fridge. Repeat.

When you feed your culture, it will start to bubble within a few hours. It will climb the sides of its container slowly, and eventually reach a peak. When it is no longer making new bubbles and it begins to settle back into its container, it is ready to be fed again. This process happens very, very slowly in the fridge. You can leave it for days. I tend to leave it in the fridge untouched for 5-7 days at a time. Eventually a darker color will form on the surface. This indicates that the culture is quite hungry. Even if you aren't going to make bread, you should take it out of the fridge and feed it at least once to keep it alive.