Sourdough Starter Feeding Ratios

The amount of flour and water you use at each feeding is key to keeping your sourdough starter. Learn how to manipulate the amounts to make your ideal feeding schedule!

Figuring out sourdough starter ratios was the key to me being able to live my ideal, laid-back sourdough lifestyle.

Because I'm the type of person who loves having homemade sourdough bread, but isn't always able to keep up with a sourdough starter feeding every 12-24 hours.

And yes, I could be moving my starter to the fridge any time I foresee missing a feeding, but who in real life has that kind of constant foresight?? I just want a starter that can live on my counter and be LOW MAINTENANCE about feedings, to give me delicious homemade bread whenever I'm ready to use it.

Enter: starter ratios. I think of this as being like actually a kind of sourdough magic that people do not talk about enough!

How sourdough starter feedings work

Okay, to really appreciate how this principal works, you have to kind of know what's happening when you feed your starter. Allow me to explain in a very non-scientific, untechnical way based solely on my observations.

When you feed your sourdough starter, all the nice little bacterias and yeasts living in it eat up the food, and produce gas. The gas is what you see in the form of bubbles, and hopefully your starter rising and falling somewhat predictably.

When you stop seeing growth, your microbes are hungry again.

The more food you give your starter, the longer it will take for the microbes to eat it all.

The less food you give your starer, the more quickly they will eat it all.

Starter Feeding Ratios

A starter feeding ratio is made up of three parts, measured by weight:

starter : flour : water

The most common ratio used (the only one I knew about for years!), is 1:1:1. This means equal parts of starter/flour/water.

But! You can use a higher ratio feeding if you want to go longer between feedings. You can do 1:2:2, 1:3:3, 1:4:4, I've even heard of people going as high as 1:5:5.

Usually if I'm just feeding my starter for maintenance, I'll do a 1:2:2 ratio (most often 5g starter : 10g flour : 10g water). This lets me go an easy 1-2 days between feedings with no negative impacts on my starter. Your mileage will vary depending on the temperature of your kitchen and a lot of other factors!

I find this to be a really helpful way to manipulate the timing when you need to. So, pick what works best for you! You can change it up as often as you want depending on your schedule.

A note about flavor

Keep in mind that the higher ratio you use for feedings, the more sour your starter will be! Just like if you let your dough proof for a couple of days in the fridge, it will be more sour that if you'd baked it within a couple of hours. Same principal! More time = more sour.

If you want to curb the sour flavor, but still want the benefits of having longer between feedings, you can do a 1:1:1 feeding a few hours before using your starter.

Testing different ratios

To be ultra-scientific, I fed my starter with three different ratios (1:1:1, 1:2:2, 1:3:3) to see what would happen. You can see how it went in the photos below:

As expected, the starter fed with a 1:1:1 ratio peaked the most quickly. What I didn't expect is that its peak was also the most impressive of all the starters. It more than doubled and the air bubbles were the biggest of all the others, even at their peaks.

Next, the 1:2:2 starter peaked, followed by the 1:3:3. They both doubled, but their air bubbles were not as impressive as the 1:1:1.

What surprised me (but totally makes sense when I think about it!) is that they all took around the same amount of time to deflate. As in, the starters feed with higher ratios took longer to peak, but once they reached their peak, they took around the same time as the lower ratio starter to deflate.

Key takeaways:

If you want to space out feedings more for your sourdough starter, feed it with a higher ratio of sourdough starter : flour : water. The higher the ratio, the longer you can go between feedings.

If you don't like the more sour flavor a higher ratio starter yields, but still want the convenience of spaced out feedings, feed your starter with whatever higher ratio works for you, then feed it a 1:1:1 feeding a few hours before you want to make something with it.

Go forth with your ideal sourdough starter feeding schedule! Hooray for low maintenance bread!