Maintaining Your Starter and Preparing to Bake

So, you have been feeding your starter every day for the last five days. Good for you! But you don’t have to feed it every day.  Here’s how I keep my starter.

You will need:

Your starter (called the Mother)

Clean wide-mouth pint jar with a lid

Your trusty chopstick

Filtered water and Whole Wheat Flour

Rubber band

1.  Feed your starter as normal (30 grams of “old starter”, 90 grams of filtered water, 90 grams of whole wheat flour).  Mark the level of your starter with a rubber band.
2. Put your starter in a warm place for 3-5 hours.  When it has started to rise but is not at its highest point (you should know this as you’ve been watching it for 5 days) screw the lid down tight and pop it in the fridge. 
3. 7 days later (or earlier if you are getting ready to use it) pull the starter out of the fridge and back into your warm place.  In 3-4 hours, it should start to grow again.  If you are not going to be cooking today, follow the regular procedure for feeding (feed, let it get started growing, screw down the lid and pop it in the fridge.

BUT…

If you are ready to bake some bread you need to dramatically beef up your starter.  My standard bread recipe calls for 270 grams of starter.  Our starter is 210 grams (30+90+90 grams).  Here’s my process to increase the starter AND feed the “mother” to go back into the fridge for next week

You will need:

1 pint jar with lid

1 quart jar with lid

Your trusty chopstick

Filtered water and Whole Wheat Flour

Your “mother” starter

2 rubber bands

Part One – feed the mother:

1.  Take your mother out of the fridge and let it sit in a warm dry space for a couple of hours, until its warm and starts to rise again.
2. Put 30 grams of starter in the clean pint jar, and feed, let it start to grow and then pop it into the fridge for next week.

Part 2 – Increase your “working” starter:

1. Put 70 grams of starter (or more if you wish, it doesn’t really matter as long as you end up with more starter than you need for your recipe) in your quart jar, and add 140 grams of Filtered Water and 140 grams of Whole Wheat Flour, mix, mark with your rubber band, and set in a warm place.  This will give you a total of 350 grams of starter, more than enough to bake 2 loaves of bread. 
2. Wait.  It is going to take 4-6 hours for it to get to full size, so plan accordingly.  I will usually treat it as a typical starter in that I’ll make it the day before, let it get started rising and pop it in the fridge.  The morning that I want to bake, I’ll take it out of the fridge and let it warm up and start to rise.  When it’s ALMOST at peak rise, I’ll start the bread.