A starter is like natural yeast that can make your bread better in more ways than one because it’s a living ingredient, not composing any other harmful preservatives and whatnot. Now to make sure that you can constantly add a healthy starter to your dough anytime of the day, you have to take care of it and make it fresh and "breathing". To keep it alive, you must feed it. Feeding is easy, all you have to do is add new ingredients to the remaining.

The common ratio you have to use on your starter is 1:2:2 (starter: flour: water). The ingredients are measured by weight in grams. Keep in mind that when the starter is recently fed, it grows double its original size when you leave it to rest for about four to five hours in room temperature. If the temperature is colder, the rise will take longer. When the starter has completely risen, store it back inside the refrigerator where it can last for months.

After three days of creating and storing your starter in the refrigerator, you can directly add it to your dough because the starter is best used during that period as it gives a nice tangy flavor. The downside is that the rising power of the starter is weaker compared to a starter which is newly fed or newly stored in the fridge.

If you have stored your starter for weeks, or even months, you shouldn’t directly use it to add onto your dough. You have to revive it first because the effect would be weaker. Reviving the starter is the same as feeding it; all you have to do is to remove a small part of it and then add new ingredients and then store it again.

If the starter takes more than six hours to rise, you have to feed it the second time to activate it. But if it had risen on the allotted six hours or less, then it is fully revived.

Sometimes when you have stored your starter for more than two months, it takes a third feeding before it fully revives. That means you have to wait for half a day. To make it faster, make sure that the feeding is done at room temperature, not colder, otherwise, the time will vary.

Using and storing your starter is very simple, just feed it, leave it to grow and then store it. After that, you can add it to your recipe anytime you want.