Sourdough Starter—Keeping It Alive

Appears in
How to Bake Sourdough Bread: Fermentation, Starters & Recipes
How to Bake Sourdough Bread

By Michael Kalanty

Published 2025

  • About

Sourdough Starter—Keeping It Alive shows you how to establish a standard feeding regimen of fresh flour and water, along with a routine feeding schedule. Once you have a feeding program in place, your Starter can live indefinitely.

Now we can take a detailed look at the other microbes in your Starter. Bacteria have been in the Starter from the beginning of the process, busy setting up their own colonies. It’s the Bacteria that are primarily responsible for the flavor profile of your Starter.

At the end of this process, your starter will have a distinctive flavor, one that is unique to your local environment. At that point, the Starter can also be called a Culture. You can then move on to Use Your Wild Yeast Culture to Bake Bread.