Sourdough Starter Care

Feed the starter once a day if it lives on the counter, or once a week if it lives in the fridge. Feeding means discarding about half of it and mixing in equal parts flour and water by weight.

A healthy starter should smell pleasantly sour, almost like yogurt, and should roughly double in size a few hours after feeding. If it smells like acetone or paint thinner, it's just hungry, feed it and it usually recovers within a day or two.

If bread keeps coming out dense instead of light and airy, the most common cause is not letting the dough rise long enough before baking, especially in a cold kitchen. A longer, slower rise almost always helps more than adding more starter.
