I have my starter on my kitchen cabinet in a jar. I use it usually once a week, but have gone longer. I have found that my does better if I use potatoe water when I feed it. My doesn't like tap water. So i keep some of the water that I have cooked potatoes in. Even if you don't use it, you can still keep it just take some out if you want to or just feed it. Don't use metal anything on it. I have a wooden spoon that I use or have used a rubber or plastic one. I also have a starter that I keep in a small jar. It is from when I make biscuits. I take one of the biscuits & put it in my jar. The rest I bake of course. Then when I make biscuits again I put filtered water in the jar to let it make a liquid and add that to my mixture. My grandmother would just that a piece of dough & put it in her mixing pan that was full of flour cover it over with flour till the next day when she made biscuits again. I have so much fun with my starters, because you are taking care of a living thing and it gives back to you. There are several books out on sourdough starters and recipes for using it. My starter is one that you can make from scratch if you happen to lose it. I will be glad to share it with anyone who would like. Also have how to start your own Amish Friendship Bread so you can have it whenever you want it.

I almost didn't read that Kitchen thread, but I decided to open it last night out of curiosity. I loved it!. Anyone who is following along and hasn't read about the new toaster instructions needs to go take a look at the link above. Glad you got to see the photo this time. I have to be honest and say I'd never heard of stroopwafels before I went to Holland or I would have searched them out. I'd never eaten one when I decided I had to try making them. I don't know how authentic the taste is, but I know they aren't the "authentic" look, but after seeing the ones with the grid and so thin (so commercial looking -- ya know? ), I, personally, like the ones made with the pizzelle iron. Somehow the stroopwafels came up in a conversation between this attorney and DH (her husband is a great cook, and they wind up talking food and kitchens sometimes). She had had stroowafels in Holland and loved them and DH told her I made them sometimes. It was a couple of months later that she arranged her schedule to be here for meetings on another case so she could see our son in his high school musical (she's a former actress). That was a pretty special effort, so I decided to match the kindness (and make DH proud) with a bag of stroopwafels for her. She was the first person I knew who'd had them in Holland ad had mine and she loved mine, so I was happy. LOL They do keep pretty well, so they would be great in a gift basket -- and most people have never had them. I've seen one commercial brand sandwiched with dark chocolate and want to try that for my oldest son. If you decide to try them, let me know. I use an adaptation of two recipes and will share that with you. If you want to find your own, the cookie has many variations out there and they have all worked for me. I use mostly vanilla and a little lemon or orange flavoring when I make stroopwafels. Martha Stewart's cookie recipe is good, but I had a total fail with the caramel in her recipe. The caramel I use is from Willy Dean's recipe found somewhere on the internet years ago. It is 1-1/2 c light brown sugar, 1 C butter, 1 tsp cinnamon and 6 T dark corn syrup boiled until it thickens. That's a lot of caramel. For this last batch, I doubled the cookie recipe from Martha's recipe and still had about a cup of caramel left over. Let me know if you try them. As for the sourdough, I think it may have baked too long. The dough soft and slightly on the wet side, so I don't think it was too much flour. I was thinking the crust should have been a bit darker, so I left it in a few minutes longer. It was okay fresh, but it dried quickly. I have some other bread in the freezer for bread pudding, so I don't need this too -- hope it makes good crumbs. I like your idea about retitling the next thread. Even baker's kaffeeklatsch -- we could soon be starting a new one every week. That's okay. I do have AC -- can't live in the Houston area without it -- no natural AC like in CA. We used to live in northern CA and DS1 is now in LA and loves the weather. This is year 4 and grad school options are mostly north of the snow belt -- could be a shock to his system. I get the feeling you are in southern CA. I am going to tackle organizing my cookbooks before I do any major baking. It's driving me crazy to not be able to put my finger on books like I'm used to. That's going to bleed over into cleaning other bookcases. Could be worse......

Not idiotic. No question is if you don't know the answer, but you weren't supposed to know the answer to this one. When you make a recipe like that you feed it up first. Details below. First off, the measurements aren't important for keeping your yeast alive. They become important for using it because you want to know how much flour and water you're putting in. If you don't need a recipe, you don't even need to know that, and can just do it by feel. I.e., until it's wet or dry enough. You can work your way back to knowing your proportions just by feeding for a few more days. If you've been feeding half water and half flour by weight each time, which on second reading, I think is what you were saying, the only issue is how hungry the yeast is, and no biggie. It's still all "100% hydration", i.e., the same weight of water as of flour, so no matter how much you have total, you know how much of each. Re the whole wheat, as I said previously, you don't want to shock the starter. Especially since it's not rising strongly yet. I'd feed for another week with AP just to make it easier, but if you feel like playing it's not wrong. Start by giving it only a bit of whole wheat and the rest white, and work up to all whole wheat, or it may go into a coma. Give it some time even if it's dormant and it might recover, but this early it could give up. Probably won't, but could. If you start with 10g, and work up to the full 50g over a week, it's less likely to protest. Whole wheat doesn't form as strong a gluten because of the bran, and the bran can actually cut the gluten threads as it works and rises. Eventually, it will double, but it make take it awhile to develop "legs". If you can, use whole wheat bread flour, or hard wheat berries rated at 14+% protein (this is a different number from the one in the nutrition info on the bag, which due to rounding isn't precise enough to be meaningful for baking comparisons). I don't think red or white hard wheat matters much. White might be a little easier to work with, but not enough to fret over. Feeding up your starter means increasing the size. So you have 200g in your jar, and your recipe calls for 400g. Put your starter in a bigger jar and give it its own weight in food, but don't discard, so use 100g of water and 100g of flour. Wait your standard 8-12 hours for it to double, pull off your 100g feed and set aside/store, discard 100g and feed the remaining 200g by 100g flour and 100g water. If your starter is old and strong, you can probably just feed without discarding, but while it's young, you need more food. So, when you have a recipe that calls for "1 cup of starter", it's usually talking about a wetter starter, that's more of a thin batter or slurry consistency. For your sanity, if the recipe doesn't say the hydration ratio, or give a starter recipe where you can see the proportions, skip it until you're comfortable baking with your starter. If it is a 300% hydration recipe, for instance--the weight of the flour is always 100% and the proportional weight of the water is measured off that, so 300% means three times as much water by weight as the weight of the flour--so once you've separated out your keeper starter, you can increase the water in your feeding, or you can feed first and add the water right before you use it. If you're baking daily, you can just keep a very wet starter going on the counter. If not, it's harder to maintain healthily. Other recipes often call for just your kind of starter, half water half flour. For one of them, just feed up the starter to the correct volume. There are different ideas about the best time to use the starter. No matter what, the whole point is that the yeast will feed on the carbs and burp making the bread rise. Unless directed otherwise, I use it after it has doubled, but well before the next feeding time. Have fun!

Annie, did you ever hear the medical old saw that someone isn't dead until he's warm and dead? Meaning that life signs can be hidden by the cold? Same is true with starter. If you think it has died in the fridge, it probably hasn't if it had any legs at all. Pour off the hooch (brown alcoholic liquid) and use a spoon to remove the darkest of the gray part. Feed the rest, let it sit up to a day until you see a bubble. Feed it again. By the time it's warm and had a couple of good meals, it should start burping its thank-yous and showing rising signs of life. Feed it a couple more times in the warmth, until it doubles volume in 12 hours (8 is better) and you can put it back in the fridge to hibernate. Once a starter is established, it's really a resilient little pet. You can also dry your starter and wake it up a few days before you want to start baking...