Today I’m breaking down how I store my sourdough starter in the fridge for several months, untouched, and how I revive it to make delicious sourdough bread again!
Making sourdough can be time consuming, If you need to take a break from sourdough, you don’t need to throw out your starter! Here’s what I do to store mine in the fridge:
How to store sourdough starter in the fridge to hibernate long term
I use a clean jar with an airtight lid. I use the same kinds of jars for when I store my sourdough on the counter. These are old gelato jars I get from my zero-waste bulk shop! But you can use any jar, it’s easier with a wide mouth jar!
With the new, clean jar, I create a sourdough starter feed of my usual ratio of 1:5:5 (5 g mature starter, 25 g flour mix, and 25 g water). Then, let it sit on the counter for about 6-8 hours for the yeast to multiply. I’ve also just fed the starter, and then immediately stuck it in the fridge. However, I find that my starter bounces back a bit better and is less angry at me if I let it feed a little bit before going in the fridge.
Either way, I stick it in the fridge with the lid on airtight. If my jar was more than 50% full, I’d leave the lid on more loosely, but since it’s only 20% full, there’s lots of room for it to expand.
How long can you store sourdough starter in the fridge?
Leave your starter in the fridge for as long as you want. I’ve left it in there before for 1 week; 2 months; and just recently; I pulled Carter the Starter out of the fridge after being dormant and untouched for 4 months. I’ve heard of people leaving it in there and still being able to wake up their starter after a year!
The older your starter is, the more resilient it is. So personally, I think it’s better to hibernate your old starter than to throw it out and start from scratch.
How to wake up my starter from being in the fridge:
First, I pour off the grey liquid I see on top. That liquid is the alcohol produced from long-term fermentation. Actually I take it as a good sign, that the culture is still active! But it also means it’s hungry, which is fine, because next we feed it!
I take a new, clean jar and take 5 g of the hungry starter, then feed it my usual 1:5:5 ratio of starter:water:flour mix. My flour mix is 40% rye, 40% bread flour, 20% whole wheat. Feed your starter whatever you normally feed it, be it rye, bread flour, or all purpose!
So feed your starter whatever ratio you normally feed your starter; be it 1:3:3, 1:4:4, whatever works!
So your newly fed starter will sit in a warm place on your counter for the next 12 hours. If it doubles, I discard all but 5g again, and feed my usual 1:5:5 ratio. After 24 hours, it has doubled and has a lot of bubbly activity, which tells me yeast and bacteria production is back to normal! It should smell pleasantly nice and sour.
Can you eat the discard from the fridge?
When your starter is cold, the bacteria will continue to grow, but the yeast production is halted. So depending on how long your starter has been dormant in the fridge, it’ll be a little TOO probiotic for your digestive system.
Compost or throw out the remainder of hungry starter from the fridge: I would not recommend cooking with it if it’s been in the fridge for longer than a week.
How do I know when my starter is ready to bake with?
Depending on the age of your starter, it should be able to bounce back within a day or two. If you find it’s not doubling or getting nice and bubbly, give it more time to ferment.
Since I feed mine 1:5:5, I felt safe to let it ferment to 24 hours, but if you typically feed a 1:3:3 or 1:4:4 ratio, you can probably discard and feed again at the 12 hour mark. Then use your starter as you normally do.
Something not quite right with your starter?
If you find your sourdough has some funky smells or isn’t doing what it’s supposed to do, I wrote a post all about troubleshooting my sourdough starter if you’d like to see what issues I had with mine and what I did to fix it. I also wrote all about how I made Carter the Starter in the first place!
It was a bit of a round-about method because I was following King Arthur Baking’s recipe for sourdough starter. It didn’t quite work so I had to change tactics half-way through. I did write what I would have done differently if I had to start over! It was a very long and detailed post, so have a read if you need help with your starter.
I kept the discard from 36 hrs + 48 hrs feeding to make a loaf of bread! You can try my go-to sourdough bread recipe, I use a combination of bread flour and whole wheat. I’ve made it multiple times with discard straight from the fridge.
Need more help?
I’m definitely not an expert, but I’ve had Carter the Starter for almost a year now, and baked several dozen successful loaves of bread! I’ve tried so many different methods, flour combinations, and inclusions. I feel pretty confident in my ability to troubleshoot and read sourdough bread now.
Feel free to leave a comment with your questions (or you can reach out to me on Instagram for a more timely answer) and I’ll try to help if I can! Good luck, and happy baking :)
Barb Critchfield says
Do I bake with the discarded amount? Or discard, feed, then bake with a potion of that after it doubles in size?
Lisa Le says
You can bake with the discard if you like. I often bake my bread with discard (recipe here) but I also have a few discard recipes like banana bread and chocolate chip cookies that don’t require the fermentation like sourdough bread does.
Kelly says
I have a starter in my fridge and it’s been there for a week. I want to bake with it. What do I need to do? Everywhere I look shows how to take a part of the starter and feed that, but does not explain what to do with that small bit. I want to feed my entire starter as I was told I needed to do if it was refrigerated. How do I keep feeding that and how do I use some of that to bake with?
Lisa Le says
I don’t really feed my starter once it’s refrigerated. Carter goes dormant! I only pull out to feed when I’m getting Carter ready to bake with again. You can feed your fridge starter like you would normally if you like: discard most and feed a small portion your usual ratio (I typically do 1:3:3 or 1:4:4) and then stick it back in the fridge. Your starter will need a few days of regular feeds before it’s ready to bake again.
Charlotte says
Your instructions were super easy to follow and for me that’s awesome! My starter, Bettlejuice, is about 2 years old now and doing great! I’ve been feeding him every week though and I was looking for a longer term storage for when I cannot do this at times! Thank you for the great information on doing this!!! I’m going to put Bettlejuice on a break starting today!!
Lisa Le says
I love that! Long love Beetlejuice haha
Anthony Done says
hello,great advice,my question is i have a clip top jar ready to make my starter,do i fully seal the lid and clamp it down or just rest the lid by not clipping it down. i cant find an answer anywhere,many thanks..Anthony. P.S. my jar is not named as yet.
Lisa Le says
I would just rest the lid! I use a loose-fitting lid or a plastic lid because you need to give it a bit of air to expand
Tina says
My starter’s name is KRUH, which is Croatian for bread. My Mom’s side of the family is Croatian…😀
Patricia Gillard says
what always confuses me, is that people don’t refer to their starter as their “Mother” and always refer to it as Starter. What I was always told is that you make or buy your “starter” this “starter once mature becomes “Mother” the mother can stay on your counter if fed daily and you make a lot of bread, or if like me and you only make bread once a week, then i take mother out of the fridge and pour off 1/4 cup of discard from the mother into a fresh jar-this jar then becomes my starter for the bread. Both mother and discard sit on counter for about 2 hours till they come to room temperature. I feed “mother” 1/4 cup of water and one heaping 1/4 cup of bread flour. I let both rise for a few hours. Mother goes back into the fridge till I am ready to make my next loaf. the discard that i poured off, then fed is now my starter. Starter then rises and then i add 1 1/2 cups of water and 4 cups of flour. (you can also use grams, but i measure accurately and have not had any problem yet with using this good recipe using cups instead of measuring by weight). What ever recipe you use weight/cups there is a difference between Mother/Discard and Starter. I heard twice today, of people using all of their “mother” to make bread then wondering what to do to make more bread. We need somehow I think to make sure that Mother/discard/starter (your fed discard) are separated and that we don’t use the same terms for mother and for starter. I am actually still quite new at sourdough, but this was talked about in the class i took and find it confusing, when people refer to mother as starter, and don’t separate mother from the starter they use to make their bread. Mother is what can last hundreds of years and be passed to your children and grandchildren. I think the distinction is important or the two newbies I read about today will keep using up their mother and have to buy or start the process of recreating a mother all over again. Thoughts?
Janine Phillips says
I made English muffins and my mom said they were good, however; when I buy English muffins they are not so dense. Please explain or help me understand why. Thank you
Lisa Le says
Hi Janine,
I’ve only attempted English Muffins once and they were not great so I don’t have much wisdom to impart, sorry!
Deanna says
We are going on a trip for 2 weeks and we are leaving our car in a parking lot, in it will be my starter. I have no idea what the weather will be like, but I want to take the starter with me when we return and drive down to Arizona for the winter…it will likely be cold and it’ll be in a cooler…but what happens if it FREEZES? Will that ruin it?
Thanks for any advice.
Deanna
Lisa Le says
Starter is surprisingly resilient! I have had frozen starter bounce back after a few feeds no problem :)