It's just flour and water that sat out
A starter is not complicated. People build it up in their heads into something bigger, which is a separate problem from the starter itself.
It's flour and water. You leave it out. Wild yeast and bacteria already floating around your kitchen move in and start eating the flour. That's the entire trick. There's a lot of microbiology behind why it works, and I'm not going to pretend I can explain the deep science of it — I can't, past the basics, and I'd rather say so than fake my way through it. What I can tell you is what it looks like when it's working and what to do when it isn't. Four years of doing this, not a food science degree.
So don't let anyone sell you a special kit to begin with. A bowl, a spoon or a fork, a jar with a loose lid. Your hands, eventually. That's the list. My theory is that people buy gear so they can feel like they're preparing instead of actually starting, and then the gear sits in a cupboard. Skip that step.
Day one
- Weigh out 50 grams of flour and 50 grams of water, room temperature.
- Stir it together in your jar until there's no dry flour left. It'll look like thick pancake batter.
- Loose lid or a plate on top — not sealed tight, it needs air.
- Put it somewhere you won't forget about it.
That last one matters more than it sounds. My first starter died on day four because I set it on top of the fridge, decided that was fine, and forgot it existed. Top-of-the-fridge is warm, warmer than I'd assumed, and by the time I remembered it, it had gone bad. I concluded I had personally ruined sourdough as a concept. Then I read that you just start over. No big deal. Second one took fine. So if yours dies, you're not special, you just make another one. Lower the stakes on yourself.
Feeding it
Once a day, you feed it. Discard most of it, keep a small amount, add fresh flour and water in equal weights to what you kept. I keep a small starter and feed small. A lot of sourdough talk out there acts like you have to throw away half your starter every single day and feel bad about all that wasted flour going down the drain. I don't. Keep less, feed less, waste less. That's how I do it.
Use a scale for this if you have one. It's the one piece of equipment I'll actually push you to buy, and a cheap one is fine. Cups lie to you, especially with flour — how much ends up in a cup depends on how you scooped it, how packed it is, all of it. Weight doesn't.
Water temperature, because it trips people up
Our tap water up here runs cold, and I mean genuinely cold, not "kitchen sink cold" like people at lower elevations mean. I spent about a month wondering why my dough always seemed sluggish and slow before I traced it to the water. I'd been using it straight out of the tap without thinking about it. I warmed it up a little — nothing dramatic, just took the chill off — and everything changed almost immediately. Small thing. Big difference. Aim for something like room temperature to just slightly warm, not hot enough that it feels warm on your wrist.
What you're watching for
Somewhere between day three and day seven, depending on your kitchen, you'll start to see bubbles. It'll smell a little sour, maybe a little like yogurt or beer. It'll rise after a feeding and then fall back down a few hours later. That rise-and-fall is the sign of life you're after.
Now the part I actually want to land, because it'll save you grief later: watch the starter, not the clock. Every recipe and every blog post you find was written by someone at their elevation, in their kitchen, with their water. We're up around 4,600 feet here, and things move faster than sea-level instructions expect, especially once the weather warms up. I learned this with my actual dough, not just the starter — I followed a recipe from someone at sea level, let it rise the full time they said, and ended up with a loaf that had overproofed and collapsed on itself. Deflated, sad, nothing like what I was picturing. The recipe wasn't wrong. It just wasn't written for here. Once I started watching what the dough was actually doing instead of trusting a timer, things got a lot more consistent.
One more, since we're at elevation and the air here is dry, especially in winter: keep that lid or a damp cloth over your starter jar so the surface doesn't dry out and skin over. Took me longer than it should have to work out that one was that simple.
Before next time
Feed your starter once a day between now and our next session — same time each day if you can manage it, it helps you both get into a rhythm. Write down what you see, even just a line or two. A spiral notebook works better for this than your phone, in my opinion, but that part's up to you.
- J