How to look after a sourdough starter (and keep it alive)

Feed it regularly with fresh flour and water, keep it warm when you want it active and in the fridge when you don't. That's most of looking after a sourdough starter, and a well-kept one will raise your bread for years.

What a starter is

A starter is flour and water left to ferment until it's full of wild yeasts and bacteria. Each feed gives them fresh food, so they multiply and make the gas that makes it bubble and rise. Most home bakers feed with equal weights of flour and water. Some keep a firmer starter with less water, which ferments more slowly and tastes milder. Helene's Simple Sourdough is made from a firm wholemeal starter.

How often to feed it

At room temperature a starter needs feeding about once a day, or more often in a warm kitchen. In the fridge, once a week is usually enough, because the cold slows everything down.

If you bake once or twice a week, keep it in the fridge. Take it out and feed it the day before you bake, or the morning of.

How to tell it's ready to bake with

A few hours after a feed, a lively starter will have risen a lot, often doubling. It'll be bubbly all the way through and domed on top, or just starting to sink back, and it'll smell pleasantly tangy, a bit like yoghurt.

Use it at or near that peak. Too early or too late and the bread won't rise as well.

If it goes quiet

Starters are hardy. A layer of grey liquid on top, often called hooch, just means it's hungry. Pour it off or stir it back in, then feed it.

To revive one that's been ignored in the fridge, throw most of it away, feed what's left with fresh flour and water, and keep it somewhere warm. Do that once or twice a day. Most come back within a few feeds.

Pink or orange streaks, or fuzzy mould, are a different story. Throw that one away and start again.

Learn it hands-on

A starter makes much more sense once you've seen and smelled one at its best. On a sourdough workshop in Mears Ashby you learn how to make, feed and use one, and you take your own home at the end of the day. When you've got it going, our timetable for your first loaf takes you from starter to bread.