Ask Lemmy

It's not that hard. You just need to keep it fed on a daily or semi-daily basis.

Take some of your starter (use the other part for baking or throw away), add new flour and water to it, mix well, put in the fridge. Not much more to it.

Some people store a part of their starter in the freezer and only feed it once a month, but it has the risk of killing the culture.

Can be quite wasteful if you're not using it regularly, but it's great for bread.

I used the numbers in this video as a rough guideline to maintain it, when I still had mine:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTAiDki7AQA

but the exact numbers don't really matter. it's more of a rule of thumb

Edit: The most important part is to name it, though. Mine was called Remy

Hey, I'm sure I'll be the first to be downvoted, but I've maintained a self-made sourdough starter for 8 years. It's survived spills, falls, mishandling, and everything you can imagine. I've made hundreds of pounds of dough and even started a side pizza business. We've kept it in the refrigerator for months and fed it equally outside when active. We never use whole wheat, only choosing high-protein white all-purpose flour, mixing it 1:1 with equal parts water every day when active. Good luck—it's not rocket surgery, at least from my experience.

Don't stress it, feed it everyday for at least a month, treat it like a pet- good luck!

Sourdough starters really only need a ton of babying when they're new. Like the other commenters said, it's just giving it warm water and flour, people recommend different ratios for optimal vitality but an established starter won't die because you went from 60/40 flour to 50/50 or whatever. You've got some good responses here but also check out !sourdough@lemmy.world for more tips and pictures of delicious bread.

Like everyone is saying, once a starter is established, it's so easy to maintain and bake with. If you are used to making bread with commercial yeast, rejoice, sourdough is much more robust and forgiving. I keep mine in the refrigerator and when planning to bake take it out and refresh for a day or so. You can use it for anything you made with yeast, I've even made croissants! Soft bread, all sorts of stuff but the easiest and the one my kids call "the sourdough" I do this, for two loaves:

1kg flour, any mix of strong white flour and whole grain seems to work but 100% white rises slower and 100% whole grain is harder to handle and denser, 30-50% seems to work best for me.

600-800 grams of water, start with the lower end until you are used to handling the dough.

20-25g of salt.

200g of starter

That's it. Mix them and do "stretch and fold" about 4-5 times over the next two hours, bulk rise a couple more hours, shape, then either rise and bake or refrigerator overnight.

I bake in a preheated cast iron Dutch oven, 450F, 25 minutes with lid and 25 minutes open.

My tip is refrigerate the shaped dough overnight instead of rising it on the counter. So much easier to score. If you are having trouble shaping, again, refrigerate. Cold dough is easier to handle and a long slow rise adds flavor.

Not every single loaf will work, I've made some doorstops, usually when hurrying.

The Tartine book, this one was the most helpful for me.

Lots of good advice in here, so I won’t repeat most of it.

One thing that I didn’t see anyone cover is how to tell a culture is “healthy”. My recommendation for this is to use a container that you can add graduation marks to. Put some lines on it to indicate volume. Then when you feed your culture, keep track of what volume you have in flower/water. Then watch the starter volume over time. People often say: feed every x_time. In my experience it’s far more important to time the feedings based on the activity. Once you do this for a short while in your specific environment, you will get a feel for how often you need to feed. My house “room temp” varies quite wildly across my seasons. So I have to feed more in the summertime, and less in the winter.

Your mileage may vary.

Hello, I have been doing sourdough from quite some time now. My advice would be to search some dedicated channels on youtube. Pro Home Cooks, The bread code, Sourdough journey are all great sources of information. The quantity of information you can get can be overwhelming but the actual process is not so complicated and sourdough starter is actually quite resistant.