Hi everybody, welcome back to my kitchen. In today's video I am going to show you how I maintain a sourdough starter. Now there are several different ways on methods that people use to maintain a starter, but this is the way that works for me and it's simple and that's why I'm turning it with you. Because I like to keep things as simple as possible. So if you don't have a sourdough starter yet, I will link to how to make a sourdough starter as well as my recipe for beginner sourdough bread. And trust me, once you learn how to make sourdough bread, you will never want to buy bread from the store again. So let's go ahead and I'm going to show you two different ways to maintain your starter. One is a daily maintenance and the other is a weekly maintenance. So if you bake often, say more than a couple of times a week, then I would suggest going with a daily maintenance. If you bake less than one time a week, maybe a couple of times a month, then you need to follow the weekly maintenance. Now whether you follow a daily maintenance or a weekly maintenance, the measurements that you're going to use are exactly the same. So let's go ahead and I'll show you the measurements for that. And then I'll tell you what you should do on each one of those schedules. So I'm going to turn my scale on there. And you really do need a scale if you're going to bake sourdough bread. This one, I'll leave a link to. I love it because you can put a bowl on it and see all the measurements. So it's really, really handy. I use ball jars to keep my starter in. This is a pint size wide mouth jar and the measurements that I'm going to show you fit very well. I've never had anything spill over. So I highly advise these jars. Okay. The measurements for maintaining a starter are 25 grams of mature starter, 100 grams of water and 100 grams of flour. I use a mixture of 50% all-purpose flour and 50% whole wheat flour. So now that we have our scale on, I'm going to tear the scale and bring it to zero. I like to put my water in first. Let me see if I can see the screen. Now we are going to take 25 grams of starter. And if you go over a little bit on this, don't worry about it too much. But I like to mix the water and the starter together first. I feel like it makes a mix together a lot more evenly than if you just throw everything in there. So it's probably going to be a little bit over 25 grams here. Okay. So that's 29 grams and that's perfectly fine. Don't worry about it. Just aim for 25. Now I'm going to go ahead and tear this out again. And I want to stir the water and the starter together and get that mixed up really, really well. Okay. So I'm going to go ahead and let's already tear it out. And we're going to add 100 grams of this flour. Now when I am doing a daily maintenance schedule, I will do this in the morning. I put my coffee on and then I feed my starter. One of the reasons why I like to do it in the morning is because if I want to bake bread the following day, I will take 25 grams from my starter and I will build a Levain to bake bread with. This starter keeps going and going and going. I never use up all of this. I take from it to build a little vein. So you want to get this stirred up really, really well. Just make sure there's no dry bits or anything. I like to scrape down the sides. Okay. Now another thing that I'm really, really anal about is making sure that this jar is clean. So I just take a rag or paper towel and clean around the rim. Just make sure nothing gets too sticky. Okay. Just lightly cover that. I'm just setting that on top. Okay. You want it to be able to breathe. And if you are on the daily maintenance schedule, you're just going to set that on your countertop. You're done until the next day. If you're on the weekly maintenance schedule, you'll let this sit out for a few hours. Let it rise a little bit and then you'll just pop it in the fridge until it's time to feed it or you want to bake some bread. So that's it. The last thing I wanted to show you really quickly is you want to have an emergency backup just in case glass breaks. Things can get contaminated. And you know, the last thing you want to do is have to start all over again building a new starter. So what you can do, let me get this out of the way, what you can do is normally I forgot to mention that this leftover starter that that's not used, you can just throw it away. You can compost it. You can put it into pancake batter. There's a lot of things you can do with it. You know, normally I just throw this away. I'm not going to use it. But I think it's worthwhile to at least one time do this method that I'm going to show you of drying out some starter and that way you have a backup. So what I did is I have a silpat mat and I put it on a baking sheet. And then you just take your starter that's left over that you would normally throw away and you're going to spread it onto this sheet. And you're just going to let it sit out and you're going to let it dry. And you can see this one's not completely dry yet. There's some some spots that are still wet. The thinner that you can smooth that out the faster it's going to dry. But once it's dry, you just break it up in the pieces just like this and you store it in a jar in a cool dry space. And that way, having forbid that I lose my starter for some reason, I've got some backup that I can rehydrate and it'll be easier to get this going rather than starting a whole brand new starter. So that's it guys. I hope that I was able to answer any questions that you had about maintaining a starter. If I didn't, please ask them in the comment section below. And if you found this video helpful, please give me a thumbs up, subscribe to my channel. And I look forward to sharing more really simple recipes with you guys. And so until next time, see you then. Bye. .