Reviving a Starter You Neglected
Okay. Somebody in every class asks me this one with a little guilt in their voice, like they're confessing something. You went on vacation. You had a baby, or a broken arm, or a bad month, and the jar sat in the fridge for three weeks, or six, or you're emailing me from month four wondering if it's too late.
It's probably not too late. A starter is tougher than people think. I've brought back jars that looked flat-out abandoned. Let's walk through it.
First, look at it before you do anything
Pull the jar out and actually look at it before you touch it.
Grey or brownish liquid on top, sometimes called hooch — that's normal. That's the starter telling you it ran out of food and started drinking its own runoff. Not a problem. Stir it back in or pour it off, your call, doesn't matter much.
Pink, orange, or fuzzy anything is a different story. That's not neglect, that's contamination, and I covered that whole situation in the pink-and-smells-wrong lesson. If you see that, don't try to revive it. Start over. I know that's not what you want to hear after you kept a jar alive on your counter for a year, but that one's not coming back and I'd rather you not eat something you're not sure about.
If it's just grey liquid, a sour or boozy smell, and maybe looks a little separated and sad — that's a neglected starter, not a dead one. That one we can work with.
The revival feed
Here's what I do. Same as any feeding, just slower and with lower expectations for day one.
Scoop out most of it. I mean most — down to about 2 tablespoons, maybe less if it's been a really long time. You're not trying to save volume here, you're trying to give the healthy microorganisms that are still in there a small amount of food they can actually get through, instead of drowning them in flour they can't process yet.
Feed it 2 tablespoons starter, 60 grams flour, 60 grams water. That's a 1:1:1 ratio by weight, same numbers I gave you in the feeding lesson. King Arthur bread flour if you've got it, though whatever you've been using is fine, don't go buy something new for this.
Stir it well, scrape the sides down, put the lid on loose, and leave it out at room temperature. Don't put it back in the fridge yet.
Now wait 12 hours and look again. If it's neglected but alive, you'll usually see some small bubbles starting, even if it's sluggish. Feed it again on the same ratio. Repeat this every 12 hours for a couple days.
Some starters wake up in one feeding. Some take four or five days of this before they're doubling again like nothing happened. I've had both. Don't panic if day two looks like nothing happened — that's still normal for a jar that's been sitting a long time.
What you're watching for
You want to see the same signs you learned to look for in week one — bubbles through the whole mass, a rise you can mark with a rubber band, a smell that's sour but pleasant, not sharp like nail polish or paint thinner. If you're getting a sharp, boozy, almost solvent smell, that's usually just a hungrier starter than you think, feed it a little more often and it'll calm down.
I'll be honest, this is where my patience runs thin, same as it does with bulk fermenting. I want to see doubling by day two and sometimes it's day four. Feed on schedule, walk away, don't keep opening the jar every hour to check. That's my own advice that I don't always follow myself.
A word on how forgiving this actually is
My daughter down in Austin keeps a starter too, and we send each other jar photos most weeks. Her dough behaves completely different than mine — that humidity down there does things my starter never has to deal with up here in our dry air. A few months back she let hers go dormant in the fridge for almost two months during a work trip and texted me a photo like she was at a funeral. Three feedings later it was back, doubling on schedule, like it had never sat still at all. Different climate, different flour, same basic resilience. That's a living culture for you. It wants to survive more than you'd think.
When to actually give up on it
If you've fed it on a 12-hour schedule for five or six days straight and you're getting nothing — no bubbles, no rise, no smell change, just flat batter that sits there — that's the point I'd cut my losses. Dump it, wash the jar out well with hot water, and start fresh. A brand new starter only takes about a week to get going, and that's usually faster than nursing a truly dead one.
Before next time
If your jar's been sitting neglected, pull it out tonight, do the smell-and-look check, and start that first revival feed before bed so it's got all night to work.