If you haven’t started your starter yet, make sure to check out Step 1 and then this image of what your starter will look like after about 24 hours of fermentation.
Has your little bowl of flour and water been sitting for 2 to 3 (or maybe 4 or 5) days? Seeing those bubbles yet? Has your starter formed a nice little crusty upper shell? The “crust” isn’t required, it just kind of happens when air meets flour combined with water.
Once you see a good amount of activity (aka bubbles) when you look through the glass bowl, congrats! You’ve harnessed wild yeasts (and bacteria), and now it’s time to start training them so you can ride them off into the sunset use them to make unbelievable bread.
This training period is a feeding of your starter and it will allow the community of bacteria and yeast that provide the flavor and rise of sourdough to become stable and reliable. As Chad Robertson says in his book Tartine Bread (from which we are drawing this entire edition of Sourdough Starter School) this is the time to pay attention to how your sourdough changes throughout the fermentation process. Give it a good sniff before and after feeding. What has changed? When do you see the most bubbles? Do you notice a difference in appearance, smell or consistency when the temperature in your home shifts? Give a little attention to all of these things, and you’ll begin to develop a sense of when your starter has stabilized and when it’s ready to use as actual leaven for bread. We’ll discuss both of those over the next 3 days of Sourdough Starter School, but for now, let’s get feeding.
Making Sourdough Starter, Step 2
Adapted from Chad Robertson’s Tartine Bread (essential reading for anyone who wants to make great, naturally-leavened bread at home).
Equipment
- Small, glass bowl
- clean kitchen cloth
- rubberband
- (optional) kitchen scale
Ingredients
- 20% of the sourdough starter from Step 1
- 50/50 mix of whole wheat and white flour
- lukewarm water, approximately 77°F-80°F (25°C to 26.7°C), but you don’t need to measure temp at this point
Now that a few days have passed and you have a reasonable number of bubbles to prove that fermentation is happening, you’ll need to ditch about 80% of the fermented batter. (Don’t fret about this too much! I’ll have more on the whys on that tomorrow, so if you hate food waste, throw that excess 80% in the fridge for tonight.)
Keep 20% of the starter, and then replace the 80% you tossed out with equal parts flour mix and lukewarm water. You can definitely eyeball this, but if you want to do this more accurately, use a kitchen scale.* So by weight, an example: Let’s say the bubbly starter in your bowl weighs 150 g. You remove 30 g of the starter and add it to a clean bowl. To that same, clean bowl, add 60 g of lukewarm water and 60 g of flour mix. You’ll be back to the original 150 g.
Use clean hands to mix everything together until you have a thick batter. Scrape as much as you can off your hands and from around the sides of the bowl. Cover the bowl with a cloth and rubber band and let it sit for about 24 hours.
Next steps will be posted tomorrow.
New here? Start Here:
- Step 1 (Days 1-3) – Let’s Get This Starter Started
- What your starter will look like after 24 hours of fermentation
- Step 2 (Days 3-7) – Stabilizing Your Starter (You Are Here)
- Why You Should Do a “Low-proportion” Sourdough Feeding
- 4 Things to Make with Excess Starter
- Getting Ready to Actually Bake a Loaf! Equipment and Starter Health Check
- Preparing the Leaven
- (Up Tuesday) Mixing the Dough and Bulk Fermentation
- (Up Wednesday) Dividing, Shaping, Final Rise
- (Up Thursday) Baking and Cooling
*I’ve made this both ways. You will want to use a kitchen scale for the actual bread-making parts of this process, but at this stage, eyeballing is totally fine. In fact, I haven’t noticed any difference between weighing and eyeballing.
Meryl says
Question–I’m in the feeding stage and my starter really stinks just before I feed it each day. It’s hard to describe, but it’s sort of a cheese-y smell. And it goes away when I feed it. Is this normal/ok?
Amanda says
Hi Meryl,
Yes, totally normal! It’s just the growing microbe component that lays its aroma on everything, so it’s perfectly normal to smell some strong smells towards the end of feeding. If you find the smell very unpleasant, you can actually start feeding more frequently (twice a day) once your starter is strong (so after it’s had 6+ days of consistent feeding). That will give your bread a less acidic taste and keep the ripe smell from ever developing. The odor may also become more toned down, even with 1x daily feedings, once it is fully established. It may just be that your yeast and bacteria are still looking for their ideal balance.
I hope that helps!
Amanda
PS-Once your starter is established, you won’t need to feed it every day unless you’re baking every day. you can store it in the fridge for 10 days and just pull it out for a feed or a day or two before you bake.
Jill says
My starter has a layer of water on top after 2 days. Does this mean my batter was probably not thick enough from the start? I have the Tartine book and am so excited to start my new bread making adventure. I, unlike you, feel a little overwhelmed without precise instructions when it comes to baking! Right off the bat I was unsure how my starter should feel and look. After discovering the water, I did some googling and I’m so happy to have discovered your blog. Your description that the batter should be pourable, but just barely, was just what I needed. I’ve started another starter already. Should I dump the old one? Thank you!
Amanda says
Hi Jill,
No, I think your old starter is fine. I would pour off the liquid (or stir it in). The issue may actually be more about the temperature than the amount of liquid. In either case, you can always correct your starter by changing the proportion of flour to water at the next feeding. Although hardcore bakers will surely disagree with me, the starter makes up such a small portion of the total dough once you bake, I don’t think you need to worry a ton about the thickness of your starter. I’ve seen a wide variance in the thickness of starters from home bakers and professional bakers alike.
Good luck!
betsy says
I am on day 2 of the sourdough start process and mine is bubbly and starting to smell sour, but I have what looks like a thin layer of starter, a slightly larger layer of liquid, and then a mass of the starter on top. Is it OK if the starter has a liquid layer, or should I start over?
Thanks for the amazing article(s)!
Rachel Q says
Thanks for these in-depth instructions. Question: When I want to store the starter in the fridge to save until a later date, what do I need to do with it? Does it require regular feeding, or can I leave it for a couple weeks, then just bring it out a few days before I want to bake bread and feed the starter regularly to return it to the less acidic state?
Amanda says
Just put it in a tight fitting container and stick it in the fridge. I feed my starter at least 1x a week when it’s in the fridge, but i’ve gone much longer. It will develop a black liquid (alcohol) sometimes. You can just pour that off before feeding it.
And yes, just feed it a couple times before you want to use it again!
I hope that helps!
Nanna says
Hi Amanda
I’ve just started my sourdough adventure, and I am getting black water. I’ve roamed through countless books and blogs in my native language to figure our what to do with my black water sourdough and theb you popped up in my first English Google search. And hadn’t I found you I would have tossed my entire batch. Thank you for restoring my faith in my sourdough skills 🙂
Best Nanna
Amanda says
Awww! Thank you so much! I do highly recommend the Tartine Bread book if you’re looking for lots of detailed troubleshooting.
Mary says
My starter never survives after first feeding. I get really nice bubbles after 48 hours, replace 80% with equal parts white/ww flour and water and then nothing happens. I must’ve tried a dozen times and I get the same sad result. Any advice?
Anastasia says
Hi Mary, I would try a couple of things next time:
1. Use 33% starter instead of 20% – one part starter, one part water, one part flour.
2. First day, start with 25% rye flour (50g), 25% whole wheat(50g), 50% water (100ml). Next day keep 75g starter, add 75ml water and mix well, then add 50g wheat flour and 25g rye flour. Do that for the next week. I find rye flour to be much more reliable in this starting phase. After a week you can skip the rye altogether, or keep using, it will only help the starter.
3. Make sure you have a warm environment. You can even leave it in the oven with only the light on, the light bulb will produce heat and this will help the fermentation. Just make sure it is not TOO warm.
4. Make sure you respect the proportions, if you have too much or too little of one ingredient it can really mess things up.
5. Keep it covered with a towel, it needs air but light is better to be avoided.
Hope this helps, not sure what the issue might be. If nothing works, I would order a dried starter online to get a head start on it.
Ralph says
Awesome site. I am so glad we found you! 🙂
My daughter and I have set out to make our own sourdough bread.
We started the starter, and we had initial good success. She started with white flour, I started with 1/2 white and 1/2 whole wheat. Her starter had more bubbles than mine after day two, but at day 3, our starters were about the same. On day 4, both starters showed lackluster performance. Still some bubbles, but nothing like after day 2. Day 5 similar to day 4. Do we just keep feeding?
Amanda says
Hi Ralph,
I would definitely keep feeding in your shoes. Sometimes a small change in temperature can impact things, so a day or two more of feeding can be the key! Best of luck to you!