Storing sourdough starter

I'm not sure what you mean by "feed it" every day. Do you refresh it every day, throwing half of it out? I don't think you can just keep adding to it ("feed it") every day without tossing or using part of it. Dividing it just once a week isn't going to do it, I don't think. Not out of the refrig, but who knows.

I refresh the starter between once a week and once every three weeks, and store it in the refrigerator. It depends when I get around to it, and what I am doing with it. When I refresh mine, about a 1-4 cup goes into the refreshed starter, and the rest goes into a recipe. A common thing I do with the rest is put it in a very liquid mixture (poolish, biga, whatever?) of the starter, flour and water overnight to ferment as the base for the next day's bread baking. Or I use it early in the day to start a batch of pizza dough.

I usually leave the refreshed starter out of the refrigerator and in various places depending on season and temperature and let it ferment for about a day, stirring it down a couple of times, until it looks right. Then I refrigerate it.

I store my starter in a quart(?) stoneware crock with a wooden lid I made for it. The lid is loose enough to vent it. I started it about two years ago and it is still going strong in spite of the occbuttional three weeks between refreshing. When I make that that poolish overnight, it ends up being quite strong the next morning... if I stick my nose down in the bowl it is quite overpowering... in a nice way.

The newsgroup rec.food.sourdough has quite a bit of information on the topic. There's a faq that is periodically posted, and can also be found at:

I think if you store it at room temperature and you neglect it for a little too long (which is inevitable), you will end up with a very interesting biology experiment on your kitchen counter. Shades of pink and such are not a good sign! ;-)

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