Feed me my body weight
The only really important thing to remember 👇
When you bake homemade sourdough bread, what you really need to anchor in your brain is this:
Feed it the same amount of food as there is starter. Feed it its AT LEAST its body weight.
So you weigh the starter.
Feed it AT LEAST that amount in FLOUR.
As long as you do this, your starter will be fed.
For example:
Your Sourdough Starter weighs 50g
So you feed it at least 50g of flour
But what about the water?
You can feed the starter ANY amount of water. You can feed it less water to flour or more water to flour.
But what’s recommended is
The same amount of water to flour.
So in this case, 50g of water.
☝️This is a feeding ratio of 1 : 1 : 1, AKA equal parts starter to flour to water
That looks like this:
50g starter : 50g flour : 50g water
| Starter | Flour | Water |
| 1 | 1 | 1 |
| 50g | 50g | 50g |
☝️ Another way to look at this is that this is a sourdough starter fed at 100% hydration (aka a liquid starter) because flour amount = water amount
In other words, you are feeding your starting the same amount flour and water.
This is your control
—a baseline metric, because you are feeding the starter equal parts starter, flour, water
Once you know how long your sourdough starter will come to peak when fed at 1 : 1 : 1 —you have a baseline understanding on your fermentation timeline.
For example, I know that when I feed my starter at 1 : 1 : 1, my starter comes to peak at 3-4hrs.
Need more starter for your sourdough bread recipe?
Let’s say you have 50g of sourdough starter, but you need 500g of starter because you are making 5 loaves of sourdough bread.
Well that just means you need to feed your 50g of starter more food.
Basically, instead of feeding it 1 : 1 : 1 ratio, you need to feed it at a 1 : 5 : 5 ratio
That looks like this:
| Starter | Flour | Water |
| 1 | 5 | 5 |
| 50g | 250g | 250g |
That’s 50g of starter + 250g of flour + 250g of water = 550g of new starter
Take 500g of the new starter to make your 5 loaves of sourdough bread.
What is left over is 50g to carry on your sourdough starter and feed later.
Sourdough Starters fed like this ☝️, at a ratio of 1 : 5 : 5, is still a 100% hydration starter because the amount of flour = the amount of water. The only difference is that we are scaling up so we get more starter.