When I was a weekly baker I refrigerated and refreshed the starter every week. While you could find recipes for discarded and spent starter a better idea would be to work the quantities of the feed and tweak your process to never have to discard your precious starter. A very small quantity is needed to keep the starter going, the rest is discarded. The quantity of the feed directly impacts the amount of discarded or spent starter. While there is a lot of information available on how to schedule a baking cycle and the proportion of the flour/water for the feed there is very little on how to customize this for your needs.Īnother problem is that most processes described online result in some amount of discarded or spent starter. It was when I started to maintain the starter that I realized I needed a schedule to ensure I had an active and bubbling starter when I was ready to bake. I now have an active starter that I keep in the refrigerator to be revived when needed. I used the book Flour Water Salt Yeast by Ken Forkish to get me started. If you do not have a starter yet then you should get one started. You need some help in getting the process into a schedule that fits your families needs. If you are here then you have a new/active sourdough starter that is just about ready to use to bake bread or you have one that you are already actively using to bake bread. I have updated this post for the infrequent baker. My starter works perfectly every single time.

Sometimes I bake weekly, other times I bake after 2-3 months. Everything in this post holds true today too but my baking habits have changed. Yesterday a blogging friend asked a question about maintaining starters and that prompted me to revisit this post.

I have had the starter for almost 5 years now.

Forkish sourdough