How to Store a Sourdough Starter

To bake sourdough well you need to keep the starter in condition. Even when you are not baking, feed it flour and water at least once a week to refresh the yeasts and lactic acid bacteria.

When summer arrives and the heat sets in, motivation for baking tends to drop. In that case, keep the starter in the fridge and refresh it once a week, and you will always have a stable culture ready.

That said, there are times when you are away for a long stretch, or when it is simply too hot to think about baking all summer. For those times, here is how to store a sourdough starter.

What you need:

• Sourdough starter
• Shallow tray
• Baking paper
• Silicone spatula

Step 1 — Drying the starter

First, weigh the starter before you dry it. Line a shallow tray with baking paper and spread the starter over it. Use a spatula to spread it thinly and evenly; the thinner you get it, the faster it dries.

Cover it loosely, leaving between a half and a third of the tray open, and leave it. In winter, somewhere at room temperature such as a corner of the kitchen; in summer, in the fridge. In three to five days it will have dried to the point where it cracks when you lift it.

Step 2 — Storing the dried starter

Once dry, break it into small pieces and keep it in a jar.

* When I did this, the surface began to darken from around the second day. As more time passed the smell changed too. Sourdough normally smells slightly acidic, a little fruity, closest perhaps to a nukadoko pickling bed — but this smelled like a schoolboy's feet. (Is that also what natto smells like?) Not what you would call pleasant. Normally you might take that as a failure, but I recognised the smell. It was doubanjiang — almost exactly the smell of broad beans fermenting while I was making it. So, with some misgivings, I carried on drying it.

Step 3 — Reviving the dried starter

After five days sitting in the fridge, the dried starter gave off quite a smell when I opened the jar. So: would it revive safely and be usable for baking?

Weigh the dried starter, subtract that from its weight before drying, add back that much water, and leave it for about 30 minutes. Once the starter and water have settled together, stir it well. Watching how it looks, add water and flour a little at a time until the consistency is right, and stir well again.

The schoolboy's-feet smell was gone, replaced by the smell of a well-fermented pickling bed. This looked promising.

Step 4 — Leave at room temperature

I had been worried about whether it would really come back, but it rose well — roughly doubling in four hours. Another one or two feeds of flour and water would make it certain.

Advice for getting this right

Two things bothered me while doing it: the strength of the smell, and how unsettling the dark colour looked. Here are some points that help with both.

• Before drying the starter, add a little flour without any water.
• Spread the starter as thinly as you can on the tray.
• At this time of year — from the rainy season into summer — dry it in the fridge throughout.
• For long-term storage, put it in a zip bag with a desiccant. And then in the freezer.

Do not let the summer heat stop you enjoying sourdough. When it is too hot to bake, dry the starter and take a break.

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Looking after sourdough through the summer is genuinely difficult. This article may help too.

Feeding and Maintaining a Sourdough Starter