Sourdough starter tips

Most sourdough advice treats feeding like a ritual. Feed every day at the same time. Keep it at room temperature. Watch it bubble. This works if you have nothing else to do. For the rest of us, the refrigerator is your friend. A healthy starter survives weeks of neglect in the cold. King Arthur Baking built their reputation on this reality. Feed it once, let it get active, then stick it in the fridge. It goes dormant. When you want bread, pull it out, feed it, wait for it to double, then bake.

The 1:1:1 ratio is a starting point, not a law. One part starter, one part flour, one part water by weight. But older starters can handle more food. If your starter is sluggish, try 1:2:2 or even 1:3:3. More food means more activity. The Fresh Loaf forums document years of home bakers figuring this out through trial and error. Temperature matters more than timing. Warm kitchens speed everything up. Cold ones slow it down. Learn your kitchen, not the clock.

Discard isn't waste. It's opportunity. Bon Appétit built entire recipe collections around what most people throw away. Pancakes, crackers, pizza dough. The tang works. Some bakers never discard at all. They just make smaller batches or find friends who want jars of live culture. The math is simple: if you're throwing away food every week to maintain something that makes food, you're doing it wrong.

Wild yeast doesn't care about your schedule. It cares about consistency. Feed the same flour, use the same water, keep the same ratios. Chad Robertson's Tartine book turned this into a philosophy, but the principle is basic microbiology. Stable environment, stable culture. The starter that survives is the one that fits your life. Not the other way around.