Reviving the flakes
This takes about a week of two-minute jobs. Nothing here is urgent or precise. If you are a few hours late with a feed, the starter will forgive you.
Crumbled to dust? Still fine.
If your packet survived the journey home as a pile of powder rather than papery flakes, nothing is wrong. The flakes are brittle on purpose - that is how you know they dried properly - and they get crushed in pockets, bags and suitcases all the time. Dust dissolves faster than flakes, if anything.
Tip the whole packet in, powder and all, and carry on exactly as below. Heat is what kills a dried starter, not being knocked about.
What you need
- A digital kitchen scale that reads in grams. Genuinely important.
- A clean glass jar, roughly 500 ml, with a screw lid rested on loosely - not tightened, so gas can escape - or a cloth held on with a rubber band. Straight sides make it easy to see how far it has risen.
- Unbleached bread flour. King Arthur bread flour is what Snow is used to. Plain or all-purpose flour works perfectly well too, ideally one with at least 11.5 % protein. Avoid bleached flour and self-raising flour.
- Water at roughly body temperature. If your tap water is heavily chlorinated, leave it out uncovered overnight or use filtered or bottled water.
- A warm spot. "Warm" here means 21-28 °C (70-82 °F). Below about 18 °C / 65 °F it still works, it just takes noticeably longer. The top of the fridge, an oven with only the light on, or near a radiator all work.
- A spoon, and a rubber band or marker pen to mark the level on the jar.
Two things that kill a revival
Cold and impatience. A starter at 18 °C can take twice as long as one at 26 °C, and most people give up on day three, right before it wakes up. If nothing is happening, warm it up and keep going.
Day by day
Soak and feed
Tip all the flakes into the jar - the packet from Teams Week holds 5 g, and that is the whole batch. Add 25 g warm water. Stir, then leave for 2 to 4 hours until the flakes have softened and broken down into a cloudy slurry. Give it a stir now and then to help them along.
Once the flakes have dissolved, stir in 25 g flour. You should have a thick paste about the texture of pancake batter. Scrape down the sides, rest the lid on loosely so gas can escape, mark the level, and put it somewhere warm.
If you were given 10 g of flakes rather than 5 g, use 50 g water and 50 g flour instead. The exact amounts matter far less than keeping water and flour roughly equal by weight.
Usually nothing yet. Feed anyway.
Most likely you will see very little, perhaps a few small bubbles at the edges. That is completely normal.
Do not discard today. There is so little culture in the jar at this point that throwing any of it away would set you back - the discarding starts tomorrow, once there is enough to spare. Simply stir in another 25 g water and 25 g flour. Mark the new level. Back to the warm spot.
First signs of life
You should now see bubbles through the glass and the mixture may have risen a little. It will probably smell sharp, cheesy, or faintly of nail polish remover. All of that is normal at this stage and will mellow out.
From now on you start discarding. Stir the jar, then remove all but 25 g and throw it away (or keep it, see the discard recipes). To the 25 g left in the jar, add 25 g water and 25 g flour. Stir, mark, cover.
Why throw most of it away? Because the yeast needs a generous ratio of fresh food to old culture to get strong. If you keep adding without removing, the mixture gets more and more acidic, the yeast gets weaker, and you end up with a bucket of sour paste. Discarding is not waste, it is the method.
Twice-daily feeds
Repeat the day 3 routine, now roughly every 12 hours: keep 25 g, add 25 g water and 25 g flour.
Watch for the rhythm rather than the calendar. Each feed, the starter should rise higher and faster than the last, then fall back down again. Feed it when it has peaked or just started to sink - when the dome flattens or cracks - rather than waiting for it to collapse completely.
Around day 4 or 5 many starters go through a confusing slump where activity drops off for a day. Ignore it. Keep feeding on schedule and it comes back stronger.
Switch to the normal feed
The 1:1:1 feeds above are deliberately small because there is so little culture to work with at the start. As soon as it is doubling predictably, move to the standard maintenance feed of 1:3:3 - 20 g starter, 60 g flour, 60 g water - and read keeping it alive, which is much less work than this first week.
Keep track of the week
Day four or five is where most people lose the thread - the feeds blur together and you genuinely cannot remember whether you did this morning's. Tick them off here as you go.
Revival checklist
12 feeds to go.
Tick these off as you go. You can also just print the page and use a pencil.
How to know it is ready
Your starter is ready to bake with when all of these are true:
- It reliably doubles or triples in volume within about 4 to 8 hours of a feed, and does it again the next day, and the next.
- At its peak it is domed on top and webbed with bubbles throughout, not just on the surface.
- It smells pleasantly tangy - yoghurt, beer, ripe apple - rather than harshly of acetone or glue.
- A spoonful dropped into a glass of water floats.
The float test is a reasonable quick check but it is not reliable on its own. Trust the rise.
At that point, give it one more feed, and when it is at its peak you can use it to bake a loaf. The method page explains each stage of the bake if you want the reasoning behind it.
Quick reference
| Day | Keep | Water | Flour | Expect |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | all 5 g of flakes | 25 g | 25 g | nothing |
| 2 | everything, no discard | 25 g | 25 g | nothing, maybe a bubble |
| 3 | 25 g | 25 g | 25 g | bubbles, sharp smell |
| 4-7, twice a day | 25 g | 25 g | 25 g | rising and falling |
| then switch to 1:3:3 | 20 g | 60 g | 60 g | doubling reliably |
On a narrow screen this table scrolls sideways.
Stuck? The troubleshooting page covers grey liquid, strange smells, mould, and what to do when nothing happens at all.