I've been baking with starter for years, I'll keep this super simple. As others have said it does not need to be complicated, bread is an ancient invention.

The most important thing is to have fun and feel free to expirement.

• keep the starter in the fridge, I use a large jar with a screw top lid
• use weight for all measurements, not volume. Get a pair of kitchen scales, they don't need to be super expensive
• get a loaf tin, don't worry about dutch ovens and baskets at this stage, they are purely for aestetic and what we want is functional bread
• if you need 150g of starter for a recipe, feed the starter with 75g flour, and 75g water, and give it a good stir (I use a chopstick for ease). Leave it on the side at room temp for about 6 hours, but overnight is fine. As long as it's spongy you'll be fine.

That's it.

The following is the loaf recipe I've used for years. It makes a 3lb / 1300g loaf, so adjust the amount depending on the size of the tin.

• 206g starter

• 615g flour

• 410g water

• 5g sugar

• 6g salt

• 10g apple cider vinegar

• Mix starter, sugar, water, and half the flour together in a bowl, leave for at least 30 minutes (I usually do this overnight cos I'm lazy)

• Mix in the remaining flour, salt, and vinegar

• Knead for 3-5 minutes - the mixture will feel wet, it is, but as long as everything has been mixed in you're fine. Resist all urges to add extra flour.

• Place in a large bowl and cover with a tea towel, leave for 2 hours / double in size

• Pour a small amount of oil (like the size of a coin) on your worktop, and wipe it around with your hand to make a large rectangle, with the long side nearest you / "landscape"

• Lightly oil your loaf tin

• place dough in centre of rectangle, and shape the dough to be about the size of a letter / A4 paper, with the long side nearest you / "landscape"

• imagine the dough has 3 equal sections. Take the left section and fold it on top of the middle section. Then take the right section and fold it on top of both so you have 3 "layers" in the middle of the rectangle

• roll it over, so the bottom layer is now facing upwards / on top

• place in to the loaf tin

• put in a CLEAN, and lightly oiled plastic bag and leave to rise for 2 hours / doubled / tin is full

• bake at 200C fan for 40 minutes

Enjoy!

It's not that hard. You just need to keep it fed on a daily or semi-daily basis.

Take some of your starter (use the other part for baking or throw away), add new flour and water to it, mix well, put in the fridge. Not much more to it.

Some people store a part of their starter in the freezer and only feed it once a month, but it has the risk of killing the culture.

Can be quite wasteful if you're not using it regularly, but it's great for bread.

I used the numbers in this video as a rough guideline to maintain it, when I still had mine:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTAiDki7AQA

but the exact numbers don't really matter. it's more of a rule of thumb

Edit: The most important part is to name it, though. Mine was called Remy

Hey, I'm sure I'll be the first to be downvoted, but I've maintained a self-made sourdough starter for 8 years. It's survived spills, falls, mishandling, and everything you can imagine. I've made hundreds of pounds of dough and even started a side pizza business. We've kept it in the refrigerator for months and fed it equally outside when active. We never use whole wheat, only choosing high-protein white all-purpose flour, mixing it 1:1 with equal parts water every day when active. Good luck—it's not rocket surgery, at least from my experience.

Don't stress it, feed it everyday for at least a month, treat it like a pet- good luck!

Like everyone is saying, once a starter is established, it's so easy to maintain and bake with. If you are used to making bread with commercial yeast, rejoice, sourdough is much more robust and forgiving. I keep mine in the refrigerator and when planning to bake take it out and refresh for a day or so. You can use it for anything you made with yeast, I've even made croissants! Soft bread, all sorts of stuff but the easiest and the one my kids call "the sourdough" I do this, for two loaves:

1kg flour, any mix of strong white flour and whole grain seems to work but 100% white rises slower and 100% whole grain is harder to handle and denser, 30-50% seems to work best for me.

600-800 grams of water, start with the lower end until you are used to handling the dough.

20-25g of salt.

200g of starter

That's it. Mix them and do "stretch and fold" about 4-5 times over the next two hours, bulk rise a couple more hours, shape, then either rise and bake or refrigerator overnight.

I bake in a preheated cast iron Dutch oven, 450F, 25 minutes with lid and 25 minutes open.

My tip is refrigerate the shaped dough overnight instead of rising it on the counter. So much easier to score. If you are having trouble shaping, again, refrigerate. Cold dough is easier to handle and a long slow rise adds flavor.

Not every single loaf will work, I've made some doorstops, usually when hurrying.

The Tartine book, this one was the most helpful for me.

Sourdough starters really only need a ton of babying when they're new. Like the other commenters said, it's just giving it warm water and flour, people recommend different ratios for optimal vitality but an established starter won't die because you went from 60/40 flour to 50/50 or whatever. You've got some good responses here but also check out !sourdough@lemmy.world for more tips and pictures of delicious bread.

Sourdough is stupid simple, despite how intricate and complicated you can make it if you want to.

At heart, once you've got starter that's established, it's just feeding it regularly.

Feeding can be done with precision if you want, but it isn't necessary, it just makes some parts of baking easier.

You basically dump half, then mix up equal parts (by weight) of water and unbleached flour. The unbleached isn't even absolutely mandatory, but it does make sure you're keeping a fresh flow of yeast via that.

It's that easy. Generally, you don't keep more than a hundred grams total. Fifty is just fine for most baking.

My grandfather kept his in a jar on the counter for the entire time I was old enough to realize it was there until his death, which was over thirty years. He didn't even measure. Just dumped a little out, scooped some flour in and topped up with water. Well water originally, but chlorinated tap water later on. Still made incredible food. Did that every other day if he wasn't using it, but it was kept in a fairly cool area.

That being said, you will be better off filtering the water you use if it's chlorinated. It won't kill enough to ruin anything, but it does kill enough to slow down the process.

A lot of people keep theirs refrigerated and then you really only have to feed every few weeks to be on the safe side. Most starters are going to be fine for a couple of months, though expect to have to feed them for a while before trying to bake with it once you pull it from cold storage. I keep my backup in the fridge, and feed monthly. When I'm in need of it (usually to give someone a starter batch), I pull it out, feed it for three days, and it's doing fine.

My main starter stays in the fridge unless I'm baking, but gets fed weekly so that I can pull it out at night, feed it, and be ready to bake by morning.

The actual baking can be complicated, but no more complicated than baking via other methods of leavening. You run into less complications with sourdough, imo, because it's slow. You don't have to fiddle with the timing as much. You use store bought yeast, it can go too fast. Chemical leavening has to be measured out more precisely, etc.

Mind you, the more consistency you want in a given recipe, the more precise you need to be in measurements and timing, no matter what leavening you use.

You'll want to invest in a decent kitchen scale if you're going to bake a lot. Even for non yeast baking, the differences between volumes of different ingredients vs their weights can be big. Flour in particular can vary a large amount based on how you scoop it out; up to twice the weight in the same volume just because it's packed tight. There's tricks to minimize that, but scales are cheap nowadays.

Takes getting used to dealing with weights in recipes. But it's worth it, even for something as volume friendly as southern style biscuits. Instead of just adding in more of one thing or another to make the right texture dough, you get it right the first time and save five minutes, and they'll come out almost exactly the same every time.

For now? Just pick one or two things you want to make. Ask folks that do sourdough to recommend a recipe. Follow the recipes, get used to working with flour and leavening

Legit, I went from never having baked anything but biscuits and pies from scratch to turning out amazing loaves of sourdough bread in a month, back a couple years before covid. And, after covid hit, sourdough got popular, so I've helped people get going. If my middle aged ass could pick it up that fast, anyone can.

Lots of good advice in here, so I won’t repeat most of it.

One thing that I didn’t see anyone cover is how to tell a culture is “healthy”. My recommendation for this is to use a container that you can add graduation marks to. Put some lines on it to indicate volume. Then when you feed your culture, keep track of what volume you have in flower/water. Then watch the starter volume over time. People often say: feed every x_time. In my experience it’s far more important to time the feedings based on the activity. Once you do this for a short while in your specific environment, you will get a feel for how often you need to feed. My house “room temp” varies quite wildly across my seasons. So I have to feed more in the summertime, and less in the winter.

Your mileage may vary.

Hello, I have been doing sourdough from quite some time now. My advice would be to search some dedicated channels on youtube. Pro Home Cooks, The bread code, Sourdough journey are all great sources of information. The quantity of information you can get can be overwhelming but the actual process is not so complicated and sourdough starter is actually quite resistant.