Care and maintenance · Sourdough
Keeping a starter alive, including the fortnight you are away
More sourdough starters are thrown away healthy than die. The published routines are mostly written for somebody baking several times a week, and applied to a person who bakes on Saturdays they produce a great deal of discarded flour, a permanent low-level obligation, and eventually a decision to stop. The organism is more robust and less demanding than that, and knowing which signs mean trouble and which mean nothing is what makes it sustainable.
A starter is a stable community of wild yeasts and lactic acid bacteria living in flour and water. It needs fresh flour, water and a temperature it tolerates. Everything else — the jar, the schedule, the ratios, the named feeding regimes — is convenience for the baker rather than requirement for the organism.
The single most useful reframing is this: you are not keeping it alive, you are keeping it *in condition for baking*. Those are different jobs with different urgencies. A neglected starter is usually not dead; it is out of condition, and the fix is two or three feeds.
- Baking several times a week: keep it out — Room temperature, fed once or twice a day. This is the regime every tutorial describes and it suits perhaps a fifth of the people following it.
- Baking weekly or less: keep it in the fridge — Fed once a week, or less. Cold slows the whole community down without harming it. Take it out, feed it once or twice over the day before you bake, and use it at its peak. This is the regime most home bakers should be on and few are told about.
- Keep less of it — The discard problem is a volume problem. A starter maintained at 20g of flour and 20g of water is exactly as capable as one maintained at 200g, and the discard is a spoonful rather than a jar. Build up to the quantity a recipe needs the day before, from the small amount you keep.
- Ratios matter less than consistency — Feeding at 1:1:1 or 1:5:5 changes how fast it peaks, not whether it works. Pick one, learn what your starter looks like at its peak on that ratio, and you have a reliable signal. Changing the ratio every time removes the signal.
- Up to about two weeks: fridge, fed, lid on — Feed it, let it start to rise, then refrigerate. It will separate and smell strongly by the time you get back, and it will be fine.
- Longer: dry some — Spread a thin layer on baking paper, let it dry completely, break it up, keep it in a jar somewhere dark. Dried starter keeps for a very long time and rehydrates over a few days with flour and water. Doing this once and keeping the jar at the back of a cupboard is also the answer to "what if I kill it", and it costs one afternoon.
- Or give some away, which is the traditional backup — Somebody else keeping a spoonful of yours is the oldest insurance in this hobby and it is still the best one.
- A layer of dark liquid on top — normal — Sometimes called hooch. It means the starter is hungry and has been for a while. Pour it off or stir it in and feed. It is a message, not a problem.
- A smell of acetone or nail varnish — normal, and the same message — Underfed and over-acidic. Two or three feeds at a higher ratio of fresh flour to old starter and the smell goes. It does not mean contamination.
- Not rising any more — usually temperature or flour — Cold kitchens slow everything. So does a change of flour, particularly moving to a bleached or heavily refined one. Warmth and a proportion of wholemeal or rye is the standard fix, and it usually works within two feeds.
- Fuzzy growth, pink or orange streaks — throw it away — This is the one case that is not recoverable and not worth a judgement call. Mould on the surface or coloured streaking means the culture has been colonised by something else. Do not scrape it off and continue. Discard the whole jar, wash it properly, and start again or rehydrate your dried backup.
Questions this guide answers
Listed so you can tell at a glance whether this is the page you wanted. HobbyHQ keeps one guide per question family rather than a page per phrasing.
- how often do I need to feed my sourdough starter
- what do I do with my starter when I go on holiday
- is my sourdough starter dead
- what is the liquid on top of my sourdough starter
- can I keep my starter in the fridge
- how do I revive a neglected sourdough starter
- why does my starter smell like acetone
- do I have to discard sourdough starter every time
Part of Sourdough. Last reviewed 2026-08-22.