Sourdough Starter Care
Feeding ratios, room-temp vs. fridge routines, and how to read when a starter is ready.
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Written and maintained by Zehavi Works.
A sourdough starter is a living culture of flour and water kept active by regular feeding. Keep it predictable and the rest of your baking gets easier — most “my bread didn’t rise” problems trace back to a starter that wasn’t ready.
Feeding ratios
A feeding is described as a ratio of starter : flour : water. A common maintenance feed is 1:1:1 by weight — equal parts existing starter, fresh flour, and water. Feeding more flour and water relative to the starter (say 1:5:5) dilutes the culture and slows it down, which buys you more time between feeds. Lower ratios rise faster but sour and exhaust sooner.
Most starters are kept at 100% hydration (equal flour and water by weight), which keeps the baker’s percentage math simple when you build a levain.
Room temperature vs. the fridge
- Room temperature — feed roughly once a day (more often in a warm kitchen). Best when you’re baking frequently and want the starter lively and on-call.
- Refrigerated — feed about once a week. The cold slows fermentation, so a fridge routine suits bakers who bake occasionally. Pull it out and give it a feed or two at room temperature before baking to wake it back up.
Warmth speeds everything up; cold slows it down. Tracking feed times and temperature is exactly the kind of record Sourdough Journal is built to keep, including separate histories for each starter if you maintain more than one.
How to tell it’s ready
Look for a repeatable rise after feeding, bubbles, and a familiar time to peak under your usual feeding ratio and room temperature. Mark the starting level on the container and record how it changes. Flour choice and starter hydration affect the shape and height of that rise.
The float test is not a reliable pass/fail test for baking readiness. Trapped gas can make a sample float before the starter reaches its peak. King Arthur demonstrates these false positives in its float-test experiment. Use the starter’s feeding and rise history alongside its appearance, rather than treating a floating spoonful as proof that it is ready.
From here, the natural next steps are understanding hydration and baker’s percentage so the levain you’ve just grown slots cleanly into a formula you can repeat.