How often should I feed my sourdoughs starter and how much if I dont plan to bake for a few weeks?
I am keeping my starter in the fridge in a glass jar with a lid (and the rubber and the rubber seal removed (as recommended in one of the starter videos)
Would love to get clear instructions. on how often and how much to feed it.
You are going to get as many different answers to this question as you get answers. And they will all be correct. Under most circumstances, it’s really pretty easy to maintain your starter and you really have to abuse it to kill it.
Here’s what I do.
Every 2 or 3 weeks I discard 95% of the existing starter (can use it to make pancakes or waffles or other things) and then stir in about 2/3 cup of flour and 1/2 cup of water. I leave it out on the counter for a couple hours to give the microbes a chance to frolic a while, then it goes into the fridge. This makes a very small amount of “mother” starter that always lives in the fridge.
The evening before I’m going to bake, I create a levain (colloquially, a small batch of starter to use for one bake) by combining a few tablespoons of flour, a half teaspoon of the mother starter, and enough water to give me the stiff-ish starter consistency that I like in a jar and leave that loosely covered on the counter over night. When I get up the next morning, it is bubbly and raring to go.
My small amount of “mother” starter obviously wouldn’t work for someone who was directly using the mother starter in recipes. I just like the efficiency of keeping a small amount of starter in the fridge to keep the right culture of microbes going and the flexibility of being able to create bake-specific levains with particular flour.