Started on whole rye, moved to white bread flour at day 4, 100% hydration, one feed a day, kitchen sitting around 26C. Day 3 was spectacular — bubbles, doubled, smelled like beer. Days 6 to 9 it has been flat liquid that pours like a thin batter, with a few bubbles on top and nothing else. Do I feed through this or have I killed it?
The thinning itself isn't a death signal, it's enzymes. Whole grains bring a lot of amylase and protease along with them, and in an acidic environment the protease chews through the gluten network that was giving your mixture body. So a starter that goes from thick paste to pourable is often just doing chemistry rather than dying. It thickens back up once the yeast population builds and starts producing gas fast enough to hold structure.
Which is also why the rye-heavy ones look soupier for longer. Mine behaved exactly like this and it was baking bread by week three with no intervention beyond feeding it properly.
Your feeding schedule is probably the real culprit. A 1:1:1 feed at 26C is exhausted in something like four to six hours, so with one feed a day the thing spends most of its life sitting in its own acid with nothing left to eat, which is a miserable environment for the yeast you're trying to encourage. I switched mine to twice daily at 1:2:2 and the difference was visible within three days. Keep a note of feed times and peak times for a week — you'll see whether it's actually dead or just starving on a schedule that suits you rather than it.
I binned three starters at precisely this stage, on days 7, 8 and 9, each time convinced I'd contaminated something, and each time I started again and hit exactly the same wall a week later. The fourth one I ignored out of spite for five days while I was away — fed once before I left, once when I got back — and it was doubling on schedule by day fourteen. My whole problem was restarting the clock every time it went quiet.
Not dead, just in the trough. Twice daily feeds, stiffer mix, and don't touch it otherwise for a week.
@sourdough_stella · 3w ago · 2 replies
This is the most predictable arc in the hobby and almost nobody warns you about it. That spectacular day-three activity usually isn't the culture you want — it's other bacteria having a party on fresh flour, and they die back as things get acidic, which is why day 6 to 9 looks like a graveyard. The actual yeast and lactic bacteria you're building establish afterwards, and at 26C you should see them somewhere between day 10 and day 16. Feed twice a day now rather than once, and go stiffer while you're at it — around 70 to 80% hydration gives you something whose rise you can actually see.
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@crumbshot_carl · 2w ago
The stiffer feed is the practical half of this. At 100% hydration a weak starter looks like nothing is happening even when it is, because the bubbles just collapse into the liquid. Thicken it and you get information back.
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