Your first thirty days

Most people who abandon sourdough do it between day five and day ten, and they do it because the starter goes quiet and they conclude they have killed it. They have not. That lull is the single most predictable event in this hobby, and knowing it is coming is most of what a first-month plan is for.

Days 1-3: it looks like it is working

You mix flour and water, and within a day or two there is bubbling and a smell. This is real but it is usually not yet the organisms you want — the early activity in a new starter typically comes from bacteria that will not be running the show later.

Feed it as your instructions say. Mark the jar level after every feed. Do nothing else.

Days 4-8: the dead week

The bubbling stops. The smell changes, sometimes unpleasantly. Nothing rises. This is the point at which most starters get thrown away, and it is the point at which nothing is wrong.

Keep feeding. Keep it warm — most kitchens in January are colder than a starter wants, and cold is the commonest reason this phase drags on. If it is genuinely stalled rather than quiet, our starter-not-rising guide works through the causes in order of likelihood.

Days 9-14: it starts behaving

A working starter doubles within four to eight hours of a feed and then falls back. Once it does that twice in a row, on schedule, it is ready to bake with.

Meanwhile, start a jar of sauerkraut. It takes ten minutes, it is edible in about a week, and it gives you a result while the starter is still negotiating. That is exactly the argument in sourdough or vegetables first.

Days 15-21: the first loaf, which will be mediocre

Bake. It will probably be denser than the pictures. That is normal and it is almost always underproofing — the dough went into the oven before the starter had done enough work, usually because the kitchen was cold and the recipe’s timings assumed it was not.

Change one variable for the next bake. One. The reason people plateau in month two is that they change three things at once and cannot tell which helped.

Days 22-30: the routine

By the end of the month the decision is not about technique, it is about maintenance. A starter fed daily on the counter is a daily obligation, and that obligation is what most people quietly drop in February. A starter kept in the fridge and fed weekly is a much smaller commitment and bakes nearly as well — see feeding and storing a starter.

Move to the fridge routine in week four. It is the single change that most determines whether you are still doing this in April.

What not to do in month one

• Do not buy more equipment when a bake goes badly. The problem is almost never the pot.
• Do not change flour and hydration and timing at once. One variable per bake.
• Do not throw out a quiet starter. Ten days of nothing is within normal.
• Do not skip the weight on your ferment. The surface is where vegetable ferments fail.