I keep being asked the same questions (and also need to reference these myself fairly often), so here’s all the answers for feeding sourdough starter and baking sourdough bread.

feeding

How much to feed it? The standard is 1:1:1 starter:flour:water. Use lukewarm water (25~35˚C) if possible to help the starter along. You can use more flour and water (1:2:2) and it will take ~twice as long to rise. The amount of starter can be as small as 5 grams, but I usually aim for 40 grams.

When it’s eaten all the flour it will stop rising, and will be about twice the volume and have bubbles. Sometimes, if the room is cold or the starter has been inactive for a while it may not double, don’t stress. Aim to feed it daily: it’ll rise for 8-14 hours (depending on room temp), then slowly deflate back to where it started by the ~24 hour mark.

Don’t stress if you don’t feed it daily, it can survive for days just eating itself. I think of it like a stomach, eventually it gets grumbly but you won’t die. It will eventually have a layer of greyish liquid on top (called “hooch”) which you can pour out or mix into the starter.

At any point you can put it in the fridge and it will go into stasis. The best time to put it into the fridge is when it’s right at (or just before) it’s peak. You can tell when it’s passing its peak because it will deflate in the middle, making a little “S” shape indentation viewed from above.

If I gave you a starter it’s pretty old which means it’s strong, and can take a fair bit of neglect. You can skip feeding for a couple of days, if life gets in the way. I’ve left it in the fridge for 8+ months and all it took was a few feedings to spring back to life. After long cold storage, it may help on its second or third feeding to add a little bit of wholegrain flour for roughage.

dishes

If you have two of the same jar you can tare with the empty one, pour out all but (e.g.) 40g of starter from the “dirty” jar, and reuse the same jar. Don’t reuse the same jar too many times (over a week of feedings) since old dead starter/flour on the sides can introduce mold, and mold bacteria will ruin your starter completely.

Yes you’ll be pouring 100s of grams of starter into the bin all the time, this is just how it is. Just bake more bread.

flour

Use whatever flour to feed, <10% protein is fine (it’ll just rise slower). For baking, you want flour with >=10% protein, but I don’t think it matters much otherwise. The nutritional information on the packet will tell you how much protein is in 100g, you don’t need special “Bread, High Protein” labelled flour. Baking recipes also call for wholegrain flour.

baking

Baking uses “bakers percentages” which is “how much flour to how much else”. Use lukewarm water (~35 degrees). This recipe is from abc.net.au, takes about 12 hours to rise, doesn’t require a levian.

Ingredient	Original (g)	Scaled Down (g)	Baker’s %
Sourdough Starter	45	27	11.25
Water	300	180	75.00
Salt	8	5	2.08
Baker’s Flour	350	210	87.50
Wholemeal Flour	50	30	12.50

If you want to add other random stuff (olives, chillis, capsicum, pickle brine, garlic, dry meat rubs, miso paste, cheese, roast chicken, whatever really) keep in mind how “wet” any extras are, and remove some amount of water to compensate. Extras should be 15-30% if added. Brine can directly replace water up to about 50%, and it really affects the texture and tang of the resulting loaf.

Wetter (ok “higher hydration”) dough is harder to handle but they say it’s better with more open crumb (holes), no need to overthink it, just be aware.

dough and bulk fermentation

Get a large mixing bowl. Water then salt then starter, stir it up with a wooden spoon into a milky liquid, then flours. You should have shaggy dough without any dry bits. Add extras now, or during the stretch and folds to come. Cover in plastic wrap to prevent it drying out (some say damp tea towel but you just end up dirtying more things).

Rest for 30 mins, now it’s “stretch and fold” time. Wet your hands a bit, slide your fingers/palm under an edge to almost the middle, stretch and lift and fold onto the top of the dough. Rotate a quarter, do it again, 3-5 times. Repeat this every 30 minutes, 4-5 times.

You’ll notice as it develops it gets more taut, firm, shapely, and easier to handle. Stretching encourages the proteins (flour etc) builds tension in the dough. Don’t pull it so hard it tears or breaks at all, but otherwise it helps to be a little rough with it.

Let it rise for 12 hours at “room temperature”. This means about 22~25˚C. Too warm and it will develop too quickly and overproof. In winter, it will take longer, and longer rise means more sour flavour (yum!), but it won’t ferment properly below about 17˚C.

The ABC’s recipe suggests doing bulk fermentation overnight, but I find this too unpredictable, and nights are sometimes too cold. I usually make a dough in the morning so I can check in at 8 hours, 10 hours, etc. Don’t worry about the specifics, it’s mostly vibe based. You should expect it to double in volume, and you’ll also see bubble activity in it. The low percent of starter means you can expect this to take 10-12 hours.

shaping loaf

Don’t be too aggressive after bulk fermentation, the protein has developed and the bubbles have formed, so only do as much as necessary to shape.

Get something “loaf shaped” for the final rise. Bannetons are best but you can use any bowl.

Flour your bench, do some light stretch and folds to coax the dough out onto your bench. Fold it into a ball (3-6 folds) toward the center, then flip it over (crease down) and use the side of your palms to kind of shape it into a taut ball. Dust your banneton and the top/sides of your loaf a little (this just helps it not stick to the banneton).

Put your shaped loaf in, crease side up. You can put it in the fridge to stop it rising further. It can chill in the fridge for up to a day or two.

bread day

Use a cast iron, dutch oven, or anything that will retain heat from all sides. This helps with evenness in temperature. Theoretically you could just put a bunch of metal in the oven too I guess.

Preheat your oven with your pot inside at maximum temp for about an hour. (You can shape the loaf now if you’re doing this all in one day)

Tear a big square of baking paper. Get your dough-loaf and up-end it onto the paper (crease down). Take a sharp knife or razor blade and slice three deep-ish (at least 1-2cm) cuts in it, this helps it expand through the surface tension during baking. Drop it into your dutch oven, don’t burn yourself.

Add moisture: either a couple of cubes of ice under the baking paper in the dutch oven, or a few sprays of water from a spray bottle. This is optional but helps it crust up nicely.

Bake at full temperature (around 250˚C) with the lid on for 10 minutes. Then bake at 225˚C for 20 minutes. Next, remove the lid of the dutch oven and bake for another 10–15 minutes, until your loaf looks lovely and golden brown.

Some say you should rest your newly baked loaf for 12 hours. These people don’t know how to live.

addendum

Apparently if you fridge your starter at peak, you can pour it straight from fridge (and giving it some time to warm up) into a dough mix, which means you could make a few loaves from a fridged starter before needing to feed it, but this hasn’t worked well for me.

Levain is a kind of “pre-feeding” offshoot of your starter fed with different ratios which all goes into your dough. Seems like a lot of work and dishes, seems like a thing for sourdough nerds.

If you over-proof the dough will be really hard to handle when shaping the loaf. You can still bake it, at the expense of a bit of texture and “springiness” in the rise.

Recipes vary. More starter in your dough -> quicker bulk ferment / proof, and less flavour. Longer ferment -> more flavour. Here’s another recipe which runs quicker (4-6 hour bulk ferment, maybe?):

Ingredient	Weight	Baker’s Percentage
Regular Flour	435g	89.7%
Wholegrain Flour	50g	10.3%
Water	375g	77.3%
Starter	100g	20.6%
Salt	11g	2.3%

You can use the “finger dent test” to see if it’s proofed. If you poke it, it should fill back slowly. If too fast, it’s underproofed/still rising. If it doesn’t spring back, it’s overproofed.

The takeaway here is: do whatever you want. The only thing that matters is not over-proofing your dough (which can be done by keeping and eye on it and the vibes). It’s often worth baking the loaf even if it’s a bit fucked, even just to see what happens.