How to Put Your Sourdough Starter on HOLD, and Revive It

[Music] hi I'm Tom coming to you from The International Institute for the advancement of sourdough science and research of Cleveland Ohio also known as my kitchen thank you for selecting this video today I'm going to answer a question a lot of people ask and that is what do you do with your starter when you go on vacation for a month or when you move to a new city where you're going to take some time off from baking how do you put your starter on hold and then how do you refresh it after that so I had the opportunity to do this recently my wife and I went on an extended trip where we were away from our home for 32 days so I'm going to tell you exactly what I did to put my starter on hold and then I'm going to show you how I refresh this today now the first thing that I recommend is if you're putting your starter on hold you always want to make a backup so what I do is I dehydrate my starter I have a video that shows how to do this you basically spread your starter try to catch it at Peak spread it on a piece of parchment paper let it dry out for a day or two and then crumble it up and put it in a bag this will keep for a very long time people ask how long this thing will keep for some people found dehydrated starter in the pyramids in Egypt it was 30 500 years old and they reactivated it and made bread out of it I made this dried starter about two years ago so this has 3498 years until its expiration date I strongly recommend always having a backup of your starter in case something goes wrong at any time really but always before you're going to put it on hold maybe a day or two before you do that so if you're not going to feed your starter for 30 days or more you definitely don't want to just leave it on the countertop at room temperature because it'll definitely consume all the flour the the yeast will start starving and it'll significantly weaken your starter so what I do when I put my starter on hold and a lot of people do this is you put it in the refrigerator that's a very easy way to extend the life of your starter so I'm going to tell you how I do that so if you're planning to put your starter into the refrigerator for an extended period of time you have to decide what feeding ratio do you want to give it and the goal is you don't want your starter to starve in the refrigerator you want to give it enough food so when you come back and you take it out of the refrigerator it still has some unconsumed flour in the jar so I always start with kind of the basic standard feeding ratio of one one that would be 30 grams of carryover starter 30 grams of flour 30 grams of water now I've done that before when I've put my starter into the refrigerator refrigerator for an extended period of time and when I do that one one feeding it tends to come out fairly hoochy and now Hooch is the name for the alcohol that develops on the top of your starter when you're when your yeast consumes all the flour and it starts to starve it'll start giving off alcohol and you can smell it for it smells like moonshine uh and that will that has happened to me when I've done that one one one feeding so then you have the option and say okay what if I went up to one two two one three three or some kind of higher feeding ratio I found that one two two isn't materially different from one one one so another option that really slows down your yeast activity in the refrigerator is not just to change that that feeding ratio but to change the hydration of your starter and what I mean by that is a one one one feeding ratio is a hundred percent hydration equal parts flour and water is what you feed it if you give your starter less water in that feeding and make a stiff starter it'll significantly slow down the rate at which it eats the flour in the refrigerator so what I recommend doing is a 1 1.5 feeding so I'm basically going to make a stiffer drier starter before I put it into the refrigerator so in my example I'll take 30 grams of my existing starter I'll add 30 grams of flour but I'll only add 15 grams of water so that's what I did when I put my starter into the refrigerator over 30 days ago as I mixed it up as a stiff starter now this is a batch I just mixed up this morning to show you what my starter looked like when it went into the refrigerator a month ago that's basically a stiff starter right there now let me get my actual starter out of the fridge so this is my actual starter that went into the fridge 33 days ago so the first thing I do when I take it out is I want to smell it and see what's going on in here so the things that I'm smelling for are number one I'm smelling for Hooch that's the alcohol that forms on the starter when it begins starving when it's consumed all of the flour the second thing I'm smelling for is the yeast I want to smell the yeast because that's what I'm trying to perpetuate by putting this in the refrigerator I also smell for acidity or that vinegary smell because if I'm smelling a lot of acidity that means that the balance between the yeast and the lactic acid bacteria starts to get off during that long break and you need to start to work that acidity out of the mix and the last thing I look for and smell for is mold if your starter goes molding in the refrigerator you have to throw it out and start over again some people ask can I just scrape the mold off the top and keep going you can't do that because if you see mold on top there are mold tendrils that go all the way down into the star you just have to throw it out and that is the reason for the dried starter back up in case something bad happens during that Slumber in the refrigerator so what am I smelling I'm smelling yeast for sure this smells good I smell a little bit of Hooch I smell a little bit of that alcohol smell which means that the yeast was working its way through through the flower I don't know if it consumed all the flour or not I don't smell any acidity at all which is good if you if your starter comes out of the refrigerator smelling really acidic it takes a while to get it back into balance and I don't see or smell any mold so I have a yeasty slightly hoochy non-acidic non-moldy starter this is what it looks like it's still stiff you don't see that that layer of Hooch on top that you would see with a typical liquid starter it's still fairly dry it gets a little bit of discolored on the top but as long as you don't see mold on there that's okay so now that you've taken your starter out of the fridge you have to decide how are you going to feed it to bring it back to full strength there are a lot of different approaches to this some people just say I just take it out of the fridge and I just use it in my next batch of dough and just see what happens I think that's a little crazy I mean you don't really know what's happening in here your starter could be incredibly weak and if you're just going to try to make a batch of dough you have no idea what's going to happen you don't know what the yeast to acidity balances I mean if you just want to roll the dice and try that you're welcome to do that I don't recommend that I like to get my starter back to its original form which is what I'm going to try to do through these steps so the second thing that you have to think about is how do you feed it some people would say uh okay my starter is coming out of the refrigerator I'm going to discard 80 percent of it and do a one two two feeding really give it a big feeding to bring it back to life now in my opinion if this starter has been asleep in the refrigerator and I'm trying to bring my yeast back to full strength why would I throw away 80 of my yeast before I even do the first feeding so what I prefer to do is not discard anything when I take it out of the refrigerator and all I'm going to do is add 15 grams of water to bring this back up to the 111 ratio and I'm going to let this come back to life and see what happens so just by adding the water and letting this reactivate it'll tell me a lot about what happened in the refrigerator if I add the water and it rises that means I still have active yeast in the in the culture and there was still uneaten flour in the mix so I know that the yeast didn't actually starve that means I have a fairly strong yeast culture coming out of the refrigerator if I add the water I let it sit and nothing happens that's a bad sign that means that my starter started starving say that three times starter started Starving in the refrigerator and then I have to work harder to get my yeast to come back so by using this method I'm giving the yeast an opportunity to tell me how things went in the refrigerator how was your vacation 30 days in Cold Storage did you have enough food to eat I mean I want the yeast to tell me how it went so we're going to add 15 grams of water to this and let this rise foreign so I've added 15 grams of water all I've done is brought this back up to its normal 100 hydration where I've added the water that we didn't give it when we made the stiff starter so this is essentially just back to a one one no additional flour I'm going to let this sit and see what happens now when I bring a starter back to life out of the refrigerator I use this warming mat I'm not sure if you've seen these before this is from a company called relia Heat this is called the raisin dough Riser these are great it's a warming mat that heats up to about 80 degrees Fahrenheit or 27 degrees Celsius when my dough comes out of the refrigerator it just speeds things up a little bit I know that I need to do multiple feedings here so I'm just going to try to move things along I put this on the dough Riser let that sit and we'll come back and look at this in a couple hours so it's been four hours since I refreshed the starter with that 15 grams of water you can see it's risen about one-third above the line where the rubber band was so there's definitely some activity in here so what does this mean it means that this wasn't starving coming out of the refrigerator because I didn't add any flour to this mix all I did was warm it up and added water so that tells me that there was still food left in there from that feeding so that 1 1.5 feeding that I did was plenty to cover 30 plus days in the refrigerator it didn't consume all the flour so now this needs food so then you have to make the decision do you discard and feed or just feed on top of this I'm going to discard and feed because when I smell this I'm smelling alcohol in here and I'm smelling a little bit of the acidity in here that I wasn't smelling before so basically this starter is kind of swimming in its own waist now so I'm gonna discard most of this I'm Gonna Keep I'm going to keep 30 grams I'm going to feed it 30 grams of flour and 30 grams of water just a basic 111 feeding see if we can get this back on its feet it looks pretty good right now it's definitely alive it's going to come back so I have a clean jar here for my starter I'm going to take 30 grams add 30 grams of water I like to mix up the starter and the water into a little slurry before I add the flour and then I have a pre-mix here I use a 50 50 blend of bread flour and whole wheat flour I mix up about a week's worth of it in this container so I don't have to get my bags out every day I'm going to add 30 grams of that so this is the 111 feeding now it's seven o'clock at night so I don't want to put this on the heating pad because then this is going to Peak you know early when I'm asleep and then it'll be past its peak by the time I'm up in the morning so I'm just going to leave this at room temperature overnight tonight it'll be about 12 hours this may rise and fall I'm not too worried about trying to catch this at Peak I really just want full activity to get that yeast population back up then I'll pick this up again in the morning and we'll see how it looks and go for another feeding and then when I'm refreshing a starter I don't really have an active starter right now I'm going to keep this discard just as a backup in case something went wrong with this one just as a safety net so it's the next morning if we look at what the starter did overnight it doubled in height and then it fell this morning you can see the streaks on the side there was more than double about an hour and a half ago this is about 14 hours after we did that one one feeding so I would have expected this to have risen and fallen in that amount of time let's take a look in the jar you can see here it's bubbly on top it's definitely past Peak because it's falling down you can see it concaving around the sides there and I'd say this is alive but it's not like super active the way my normal starter would look but this is much better than it looked yesterday after one feeding this is about where I would expect it to be so now I smell this to try to figure out what's going on in here the three smells that I'm looking for one is the alcohol or the hooch we want to work all that out of this starter that's what develops when it's in the refrigerator for a long time the second thing I want to smell is yeast that's the good stuff the third thing I'm smelling for is acid or that vinegary smell which I don't want a real acidic starter because that slows down the yeast production so I'm gonna take a whiff I still smell a hint of the alcohol alcohol the hooch in here but it's almost gone I definitely smell the yeast and I don't really smell much acid at all which is great so now I have to decide how to feed this based on what I just smelled so again I'm smelling for the hooch the yeast this the acid I want to work Hooch out of the system if there's alcohol in here I just want to work that out and I do that by discarding if I'm smelling yeast I basically want to feed it and if I'm smelling a lot of acid I want to do a big discard to try to reset that balance between the yeast and the lactic acid bacteria so what I'm smelling is a little bit of Hooch I'm smelling good yeast not smelling acid so what are my options for feeding I could do no no discard at all and just tap this off with flour and water I would only do that if I don't smell Hooch or acid that means I don't need a discard I just need to feed the yeast and let the yeast take another run but because I'm still smelling the hooch or the alcohol in here I'm gonna discard so I'm not gonna just do a top off feeding then if I'm going to do a discard feeding I can either do my normal 111 or a higher feeding ratio of one two two one three three one four four and when I talk about a higher feeding ratio you want to think about that as a higher discard ratio because in a one one one I'm discarding two-thirds in a one two two I'm discarding eighty percent so basically you're having a smaller carryover amount in those higher feeding ratios I would only do that high feeding ratio if this was very acidic where I need to knock down the acidity and really let this restart so I get the yeast and lactic acid bacteria back in shape I'm not smelling a lot of acidity in here so I don't need to do a high feeding ratio it's a long explanation but a lot of people just want some a basic formula just says on day one do this on day two do this on day three do that it all depends on what's going on in the jar I'm trying to explain what I'm doing here so because I got a little Hooch I have no no acid I'm gonna do one one feeding moderate discard give it a refresh let it go now one other thing I want to point out is during the middle of the night I was dreaming about sourdough baking so I came out here to the kitchen I wanted to check on my starter see how it was doing that was about 1am so that was six hours after we did the 111 feeding yesterday I looked in the jar nothing was happening it was completely flat it looked like it was dead I mean there wasn't a single bubble on top after six hours and this is the Fatal moment the Fatal flaw that people make is that if you look at your starter and you say oh my God nothing's happening I think I killed it maybe I should discard and refeed again if you discard a weak starter you make it weaker I can't emphasize this enough so many people screw up their starters by being impatient if it's not bubbling on top never discard I mean that's a simple rule never discard if the starter hasn't peaked or it isn't covered with bubbles on top just give it time the starter tells you when it's hungry it tells you when it needs more food that's only after it's risen and fallen or after it's completely covered with bubbles on top if you look at the starter and there's not nothing's happening it's not saying I'm hungry it's not saying I'm dead it's just saying I'm taking a nap I'm getting off to a slow start today I haven't had my coffee yet I need a little bit more time so resist the temptation to discard a weak inactive starter it makes it weaker so after a long answer to a short question we're going to feed this 111 because I want to discard a little bit but I don't need to discard a lot so I'm going to keep 30 grams of starter we're going to add 30 grams of flour and I'm going to add 30 grams of water now do I need to use a fresh jar no here's a little trick that I use is I know how much my jar weighs you say how do I know because I write it on the bottom right there 270 grams is what my empty jar weighs if I want to keep 30 then all I need to do is measure my discard so I get a separate jar and now what I'm doing is I'm doing measuring my discard so by using that subtraction method I know I have 30 grams left in here so now I'm going to add 30 grams of water here's another trick I do is when you add the water if you want to clean your jar put the lid on tightly I just made a nice starter slurry and I cleaned Down the Walls of my jar now 30 grams of my flour blend half whole wheat half bread flour foreign so here's our second feeding back up to the rubber band line so just to recap I took the starter out of the fridge I topped it off with water that first refresh waited till it Rose did the first true feeding with flour and water last night second feeding this morning now we're going to let this rise today and see how it looks I'm trying to get this back to full strength so I have to ask myself the question what temperature do I want to keep this at it's a morning my kitchen temperature is 72 degrees Fahrenheit 22 degrees Celsius I can leave this on the countertop at room temperature or I could put it back on my warming mat raise it up to about 80 degrees Fahrenheit or 27 degrees Celsius I'm going to use the warming mat and I'm really just doing this for my benefit because I want to speed things up I know that I still have to do multiple feedings here so I'm just going to move things along a little bit faster when you decide what temperature you want your sourdough starter to be at there are a lot of different opinions on this what I find is if I leave my starter on the warming mat all the time it it favors the acidity and I get a fairly acidic starter if I keep it at 80 degrees Fahrenheit or 27 degrees Celsius if I keep it at room temperature 72 or 22 that keeps the acidity down a little bit so by putting it on the warming mat I'm just accelerating it because I know I'm going to be doing multiple feedings after this so I'm not worried about the acidity building up I don't recommend putting it on the warming mat all the time so while we're waiting for the starter to come back to life let me just take a brief moment and talk about how to revive this dried starter that I talked about earlier now if you go to my website at the sourdoughjourney.com under the tools section I have a detailed guide that goes through step by step day by day that tells you how to do this and I've sent this dried starter out to many people and I've helped people online revive a dried starter the biggest problem that I see people run into is what they do is you mix up 30 grams of dried starter with 30 grams of water and what you need to do is to wait for that to fully activate until it's fully covered with bubbles and then you don't discard you just feed it again wait till that's covered with bubbles again then feed it again so you're basically trying to just feed the the dried starter without discarding the biggest problem that I see is that people mix the flour and water they wait about 12 hours then they wait about 24 hours and it still hasn't reactivated so they get nervous and they say even though the guide says don't discard I'm going to discard 80 and feed it again because that's what somebody online told me to do or that's what some books said then they wait another 12 hours or another 24 hours it's still not fully activated and they discard 80 and they feed it again by doing two discards in a row like that you've discarded 96 of what you started with and then you wonder why it's not reactivating the biggest problem I find with Reviving a dried starter strengthening a weak starter creating a new starter is that people get impatient and they think that discarding and refeeding will help strengthen the starter if you discard and refeed a weak starter it makes it weaker it's unequivocal if you discard and refeed a weak starter it makes it weaker because you're discarding 80 percent of the yeast population that you're trying to grow so just as a general rule if your starter is slow it's sluggish the worst thing you can do is discard and refeed you can't force feed a starter just give it time it'll tell you when it's hungry your starter is hungry when it's risen and fallen or when it's completely covered with bubbles or when it's hoochie those are the only circumstances where your starter is hungry it's telling you if your starter is sitting there and not bubbling it's not because it's starving it's just because it's weak or it's asleep it tells you when it's hungry that's the key message on Reviving any type of starter never discard and refeed a weak starter that hasn't peaked or fully bubbled on top here's a pop quiz let's say you fed the starter four hours ago you were expecting it to rise because somebody online told you it should rise in four hours you look at this and it looks like this it's flat on top there are no bubbles it hasn't risen should you discard and refeed this to make it grow faster to make it stronger no discarding and refeeding a weak starter makes it weaker here's another example let's say you fed this starter 12 hours ago and somebody told you it should have risen and fallen in 12 hours you look at your starter it looks like this there are no bubbles on top it hasn't risen and Fallen what should you do discard and refeed never never discard and refeed if it hasn't risen and fallen and hasn't even eaten the food yet it's still full it's got a full plate in front of it here's another example 24 hours prior you fed this you come back you look at it 24 hours there are no bubbles on top it hasn't risen and Fallen what should you do discard and refeed no never don't do it it makes it weaker your starter needs time it just needs time it doesn't need more food you can't force feed it and every time you discard it you weaken it then after 24 hours you start to second guess yourself and you say I'm not sure if I trust this Tom guy I'm going to go online and ask some random person their opinion so you go online and say I fed my starter 24 hours ago it's flat it hasn't bubbled it hasn't peaked and Fallen what should I do people online will say that's easy discard 80 percent feed it twice a day feed it three times a day discarding and feeding is what makes your starter stronger it's false it makes your starter weaker for God's sake people if your starter hasn't bubbled and risen and Fallen there's still food left in here and discarding and refeeding makes it weaker it's been four hours since that morning feeding one one one take a look at the starter it's more than doubled and that's beautiful so this is really making a comeback if I open this up and smell it it smells yeasty that smells good it's still still not acidic which is great now when I feed my starter I smell it first I look at it and I never want to feed it until it's at Peak or maximum bubbles on Top This has peaked if I look down in here it's actually concave so it's starting to fall at four hours already so this is moving pretty quickly so now that the starter is rising normally it's doubling in four hours which is great it's still not quite back to full strength so anytime I try to strengthen my starter what I recommend is a method that I call Peak to Peak feeding with Peak to Peak feeding you ignore the clock you watch the starter after it rises you look for it to Peak it'll be domed up on top then when it Peaks it'll be concave on top which is what I'm seeing in here so that means that this has peaked at least in terms of height so now it's safe to discard and refeed without weakening my starter because it's past Peak so what I recommend is you catch it right at Peak that's when the yeast is at its maximum point discard 80 and now we go to a one two two feeding so now you ask the question why am I going from one one to one two two one one one is just my basic maintenance feeding but now that this is getting back to full strength I'm going to one two two just to give it a little more food to stretch out that interval so I'm not doing feedings every three hours I'm just trying to stretch out the time so I'm going to do a one two two feeding of the starter now the way that I calculate this is I know we have 90 grams of starter in here because we started with 30 grams of carryover we added 30 grams of flour we added 30 grams of water so I have 90. if you want to do one two two you add up the parts one plus two plus two is five so I divide 90 by 5 that's 18. so if I want to do a one two two it would be 18 grams of carryover starter 36 grams of flour 36 grams of water just to use round numbers I'm going to do 20 40 40. so we're going to go up from a total starter quantity of 90 to 100 just to keep them numbers round 20 grams of carryover starter 40 grams of flour 40 grams of water let's do it I have 90 grams of starter in here I want to have 20 when I'm done I subtract 70 using my subtraction method there's my 20 grams of starter 122 feeding means I had 40 grams of water Shake It Up now I add 40 grams of flour so this is our third feeding since I took this out of the refrigerator I'm not counting that first one where I just added water let's just call that the rehydration then three feedings which is normally what it takes for me to refresh a starter coming out of the fridge I'm going to put this back on the warming mat we'll check this now I did a one two two feeding it's going to take a little bit longer to rise versus a 111 all other variables being equal but it's also increasing in strength so it may actually catch up with that prior time so some of you are probably looking at this discard and you're asking two questions one is Tom what are you going to do with that discard and number two is why do you even need to create all this discard good questions answering the second one first I actually when I do multiple feedings like this I usually do micro feedings I start with five or ten grams so that I'm not discarding as much but for purposes of the video I'm using a little bit larger quantity here just so you can see the rise and see what's happening a little more clearly on the camera now I still generate this card from time to time I'll accumulate this in my refrigerator but my quantities are so small sometimes I'll make crackers there's some good discard cracker recipes and sometimes if it's a small amount like this I'll just put it into my compost send it out and I use it in my garden for fertilizer I also like to think about the yeast and lactic acid bacteria in here is being released into the wild because they're cousins that are in my starter now are going to die a fiery death in the oven so I like to send a few of them back to Nature so it's been three hours since we did the one two two feeding this starter has already tripled in volume it's incredible now think about that because we gave it a one one feeding on the last feeding and it took four hours to double now we gave it a one two two feeding and it took three hours to Triple so you have to think about what we did here we used less starter in the prior uh feeding we used 30 grams of starter in this feeding we use 20 grams of starter so we used less starter we gave it more food and it actually grew faster it tripled in three hours as opposed to doubling in four hours so that means the starter is strengthening the yeast population is growing and the acidity is staying low it's letting the yeast really do its job it's not impeding the yeast production so this is a fabulous result here this is really back to full strength I mean this smells like my normal starter it's yeasty it has kind of a sweet ripe smell kind of smells like a a ripe banana there's no acidity I don't smell any of the hooch the alcohol that was in here from when we took it out of the refrigerator so this is back in business I can't wait to start baking some bread with this I've been off for quite a while so now let me just recap what we've done here I basically put my starter into the refrigerator a little bit over a month ago I made it a stiff starter I used half as much water relative to the flour I stiffened it up and that slows down the fermentation process in the refrigerator we took it out of the refrigerator after 33 days the first thing that I did was I didn't feed it any flour I just gave it back that water to bring it back up to the 100 percent hydration ratio mixed it up let it rise on the warming pad after about four hours it Rose a little bit you could tell that it was still alive but it was weak so then I discarded everything but 30 grams I did a one one feeding 30 grams of retained starter 30 grams of flour 30 grams of water left that overnight that was the slow Riser that took almost 14 hours to rise I looked I looked at it in the middle of the night it wasn't doing anything but I resisted the temptation to discard and refeed a weak starter because you should never do that if you were paying attention then this morning at about 10 o'clock this had it had peaked so we did the second feeding of flour and water that was a 111 feeding and then it bounced back fairly quickly it doubled in four hours so it seemed to be growing in strength the speed at which it was Rising was improving so then we discarded all but 20 grams and did a one two two feeding three hours ago and it's tripled down so so basically in a little more than one day we took a dormant starter out of the fridge and got it back to full strength that's pretty typical with what I've seen usually it takes three feedings coming out of the fridge sometimes four feedings to get it back to full strength this is a great example of how resilient your starter can be even when you give it a long Slumber in the fridge if you found this video to be helpful please subscribe to my YouTube channel then you'll get notifications when I post interesting new videos you can also follow me on Instagram and you can find me on Facebook thanks for watching this video and good luck on your or sourdough Journey [Music] [Music]

Channel: The Sourdough Journey

Views: 31,002

Keywords: how to put your starter on hold, vacation, refrigerate my starter, how to pause my starter, sourdough starter, yeast, refrigerator, cucuzza, How to store my starter, Moving, Pause, 30 days, 2 weeks, 3 months, Put starter on pause, Store starter in refrigerator, 6 months, Sourdough starter, Refrigerate my sourdough starter, Vacation, One week, pause starter, Cold storage

Id: 6GWRkoYo5A4

Length: 32min 38sec (1958 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 21 2022