You just adopted a brand new baby sourdough starter.
Congratulations!
Chances are, it came to you hungry.
The first thing you need to do is to wake it up. It’s been sleeping in the fridge (this pertains to baby starters as well as fed-last-week starters), so it needs to be in a warm (70 degree) room for a few hours.
If your starter is in a small (probably 4 oz jar), move it to larger vessel – it’s gonna get bigger. Measure how much starter you have. Half a cup or 4 oz is pretty standard an amount to be saved. Then you want to have flour (you can use white, rye, whole wheat, pretty much anything) and warm (not hot) water.
Mix up a 1:1:1 ratio of starter to flour to water, so you will most likely be adding 1/2 of flour and 1/2 cup of water. It will look kind of like a tar pit bubbling within a few minutes. The bubbles means it’s eating! Loosely cover the starter and walk away.
Seriously. Leave the room. This will take at least an hour or two.
Just as a watched pot never boils, a watched starter never eats.
Once it has turned all bubbly and grown significantly, it can be considered fed and ready to use. Mix it, and follow any sourdough starter recipie to use your newly-fed starter. Your fed and ready-to-use starter should be at least this bubbly and should have doubled in size – sometimes more.
Remember to save 1/2 cup (4 oz.) back in your clean container. You can tuck your starter into bed (the fridge) for a week-or-so-long nap before it needs to feed again.
What are you making with your starter? Tell me in the comments!
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