Feeding and Maintaining a Sourdough Starter

My son says sourdough is too hard and will not eat it, so one bake with 250g of flour lasts two adults about five days to a week. I would like to try baking more, and more often, but it does not really work out that way.

At the moment there are two starters asleep in our fridge: one raised on bread flour alone, and one on whole wheat and rye. Baking once a week means each starter only gets used about once a fortnight. Really I should be feeding them flour and water once a week, but I get lazy and leave them. And as summer approaches and the temperature climbs, the motivation to bake gradually falls away.

More than two weeks had passed since I last baked with the bread flour starter. It had sat in the fridge the whole time with no feeding.

Let's take a look. The surface has dried out and it smells strongly of alcohol. Peel the dry surface off and the inside is quite loose, with some liquid separating. But there is no smell of rot at all. It should be perfectly usable, so let's see.

Peel off and discard the dry surface. Add bread flour and an equal weight of water, and stir well. Normally the starter would roughly double in about three hours. This time, though, I had left it too long and the culture had weakened considerably; it barely rose, and took a full day to double. Usually I take the starter out of the fridge in the evening, feed it, and by the next morning it has risen to two or three times its size and I can bake. This time it needed another day of care.

I have had cases before where a fed starter still doubled overnight in the fridge, so in the morning I discarded about half from the top, added bread flour and water, stirred well, and put it straight back in the fridge to see. But having gone in at 11am, twelve hours later there was almost no change, so I took it out again before bed.

Twelve hours in the fridge, then twelve hours at room temperature (about 27°C), and it had tripled. A proper web of bubbles inside, and back in condition for baking.

For what it is worth, here is what I baked with the revived starter.

So: with the bread flour starter, after about two weeks of neglect and with no sign of spoilage, two days of care brought it back.

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Looking after a sourdough starter, it can feel wasteful to throw the discard away. I used some of it to make rather good pancakes.

Sourdough Pancakes