How To Feed Your Sourdough Starter

The Ultimate Guide to Feeding Your Sourdough Starter

The key to exceptional sourdough bread is a strong, well-fed starter. At the heart of it all is understanding the relationship between your starter and its feeding regimen.

Your sourdough starter is a living, breathing organism that requires the right nourishment to thrive. It needs to be fed regularly to stay happy and vibrant. Skimp on the feeding, and your starter will become weak, sluggish, and unresponsive.

Sourdough Starter FeedingInstructions

Here’s a simple, step-by-step guide to feeding your sourdough starter like a pro:

Let’s say we need to feed our starter. It weighs 150g.

Before feeding the starter, discard ⅔ of starter. This leaves you with 50g of starter remaining.

Feed the 50g of starter remaining by adding 50g of fresh flour and 50g of fresh water, mix it up. This maintains the ideal 1:1:1 ratio of starter to flour to water.

We can keep doing this indefinitely, see below:

What do we do with the discard?

Now, back to the 100g of starter we discarded –you have a few options on what to do with this:

Use it right away to bake sourdough bread (using it as a leavening agent)
Add it to a discard jar in the fridge to save for future baking (using it to add flavor/texture to recipes, but not to leaven it)
Simply discard/throw it away if you don’t have an immediate use for it

What are starter feeding ratios?

A sourdough starter feeding ratio refers to the proportions of starter, flour, and water used when “feeding” or replenishing an active sourdough starter.

The 1 : 1 : 1 sourdough starter feeding ratio

1 part starter	1 part flour	1 part water
50g	50g	50g

The most common sourdough starter feeding ratio is 1:1:1. This means:

1 part starter
1 part flour
1 part water

For example, if you have 50g of active sourdough starter, you would feed it with:

50g flour
50g water

This 1:1:1 ratio provides the starter with the right balance of food (the flour) and water to keep it healthy and active. The starter consumes the flour, produces carbon dioxide, and becomes bubbly and ready for baking.

Other common sourdough starter feeding ratios include:

1:2:2 (1 part starter, 2 parts flour, 2 parts water)
1:5:5 (1 part starter, 5 parts flour, 5 parts water)

The 1:1:1 ratio is often recommended for general starter maintenance, as it keeps the starter at a manageable size. The higher flour and water ratios (like 1:5:5) can be used when you need to build up a larger volume of starter quickly for baking.

Regardless of the specific ratio, the key is maintaining a consistent, balanced approach to feeding your sourdough starter. This ensures it stays strong, active, and ready to leaven your homemade sourdough breads.

How often do you need to feed your sourdough starter?

For most home bakers, feeding the sourdough starter once a day is the sweet spot when storing it at room temperature (around 70°F). This keeps the starter active, healthy, and ready to use for regular baking.

At room temperature, the starter is consuming the available food (flour and water) fairly quickly, so it needs that daily refresh to maintain peak performance.

However, if you don’t need to bake with the starter very frequently, storing it in the refrigerator at around 36-40°F can work well. In the cooler fridge environment, the starter’s metabolism slows way down, so it only needs to be fed about once a week to stay viable.

Feeding a refrigerated starter just once a week is usually sufficient to keep it alive and ready for use. The cooler temps put the starter into a semi-dormant state, greatly reducing its need for frequent feedings.

This makes refrigerator storage a convenient option for bakers who don’t need their starter on a daily basis. It minimizes waste and upkeep while still preserving a healthy, usable starter for whenever you’re ready to bake.

Discarding Before Feeding

The reason why we discard sourdough starter before feeding it is because the starter needs to be fed its own weight in flour.

If we didn’t discard any of the existing starter, and just kept adding new flour and water on top of it, the total volume would grow exponentially with each feeding.

What would happen if we didn’t discard?

See This 50g Sourdough Starter Turn Into 241lbs In Just 7 Feedings (1:1:1)

	Feeding 1	Feeding 2	Feeding 3	Feeding 4	Feeding 5	Feeding 6	Feeding 7
Starter	50g	150g	450g	1,350g	4,050g	12,150g	36,450g
Flour	50g	150g	450g	1,350g	4,050g	12,150g	36,450g
Water	50g	150g	450g	1,350g	4,050g	12,150g	36,450g
Total	150g	450g	1,350g	4,050g	12,150g	36,450g	109,350g

NOTE: If you’re viewing on your phone/tablet, you can use your finger to gently move the table left to right to see the entire table

For example, let’s say we start with a 50g sourdough starter. If we feed it 50g of flour and 50g of water, the total volume is now 150g.

Then for the next feeding, since we are not discarding, and we have to feed the starter at least its body weight it flour, now we add 150g of flour and 150g of water to the 150g starter. That makes it 450g total.

And if we continued this pattern without discarding, in just 7 feedings the 50g starter would balloon up to a massive 241 pounds!

That’s why the discarding step is so critical – it prevents the starter from growing out of control.

By removing a portion before each feeding, we can maintain the proper 1:1:1 ratio and keep the total volume at a manageable size.

What do you do with sourdough starter discard?

Discard is simply the portion of the sourdough starter that you remove before feeding the remaining starter. It’s the excess starter that you don’t need to feed at that particular time.

You have three options for what to do with the discard:

If the starter was just fed, use the discard to bake sourdough bread, adding leavening power

If the starter was not recently fed, store discard in a discard jar that lives in your fridge. Use occasionally in discard recipes, where it adds flavor but no leavening

Discard it completely and throw it away