Guides
Starter care guides
A starter is flour, water and a routine. Start with how to tell when yours is ready to bake, then go deep on making one, feeding ratios, the fridge and discard. Every guide ends with what to watch and when to start again.
New here? Read How to Tell When Your Starter Is Ready to Bake first. It covers the two questions hiding in "is it ready": is the starter mature enough to raise bread at all, and is it at the right moment today, near its peak after a feed. The rest of this section takes one part of the routine at a time: making a starter from scratch, choosing a feeding ratio, keeping it in the fridge between bakes, and how much to discard.
The short version: weigh everything, keep only 20 to 50 g between feeds, mark the fed level with a rubber band, and watch for a doubled, domed, bubbly jar that smells yeasty and mildly sour. A new starter usually needs 7 to 14 days to get there, and a quiet spell around days 3 to 7 is normal.
Try it
Choose a ratio and the grams you keep in the starter feeding calculator and see the flour and water to add, the usual hours to peak for your room, and when to mix.
Heads up
Fuzzy mold of any color, or pink, orange or red streaks anywhere in the jar, means the whole starter goes. Never scrape it off. Wash the jar in hot, soapy water and start fresh. Hooch, a nail polish smell and a quiet young starter are normal.
Guides in this section
Coming soon: Sourdough Starter: A Plain Guide to Keeping One; How to Make a Sourdough Starter: What Each Day Looks Like; Sourdough Starter Feeding Ratios: 1:1:1 to 1:10:10; Do You Have to Discard Sourdough Starter?; Keeping a Sourdough Starter in the Fridge; Your Sourdough Starter While You Are Away.