This is a very common problem that people have when they make their first sourdough starter at home. And while it’s not the worst thing that can happen you still have to deal with it and see why this happened in order to prevent it in the future.
Hooch is the liquid that collects on top of a sourdough starter when it hasn’t been fed for some time. Hooch is a mix of water the alcohol that formed during the fermentation process. Its presence doesn’t mean that something bad happened to your starter, it just means that it’s hungry.
As I said this is not the worst thing that can happen, and it can be easily solved, but what really matters is understanding why this happened and how to prevent it from happening again. So let’s take a look at just that, and after that, we will see what are the different ways in which you can deal with it, and how those different ways will affect your starter.
Why Your Sourdough Starter Has Hooch on Top of It
As I said hooch forms when a starter is hungry, but your starter can be hungry due to a number of reasons, besides forgetting to feed it, the most common reasons are:
- Temperature
- Wrong Feeding Ratio and Measurements
- Improper Flour
Temperature
Temperature can have a huge effect on how a starter acts, how much it needs to eat, and how fast it eats.
The ideal temperature to store a starter is between 70°F(22°C) and 75°F(24°C). Storing it at a temperature lower or higher than this will have effects on how often the starter should be fed.
If the starter is stored at a higher temperature it will become more active and it will need to be fed more often, and if it’s stored at a lower temperature the opposite is true, it won’t require to be fed as often.
While you probably already have a room thermometer, I still want to recommend you to try a laser thermometer, it will allow you to find the exact temperature of your dough, which in most cases is different than the room temperature. And as a bonus it’s really fun to to check the temperature of things around you (or at least for me it is). Here is a link to the one that I’m using.
Wrong Feeding Ratio and Measurements
While the feeding ratio and the measurements are two different things, they are closely related, and getting the wrong measurements will usually lead to a wrong ratio.
Starters are usually fed according to a ratio, the most common one being 1:1:1, but there are more, like 1:3:2, or 2:3:1.
A ratio like 1:3:2 means that you will be using 1 part starter, 3 parts flour, and 2 parts water, which can mean 50 grams of starter, 150 grams of flour, and 100 grams of water.
Different ratios will result in different types of starters, some can be more liquid and some can be more solid, but all of them have one thing in common. Any good ratio will always use more flour than starter. Using less flour than starter means that you are not giving your starter enough food.
But having a good ratio can be meaningless if you don’t measure ingredients correctly.
The most common mistake is using cups instead of grams to measure the ingredients. Cups are used to measure volume, grams are used to measure weight. One cup of flour weighs 120 grams, while a cup of water weighs 236 grams. And the weight of the starter will vary from starter to starter.
The simplest way to avoid any mistake is a to use a scale, just make sure that you get one that can measure both weight and volume. Here is a link to the one that I use.
Improper Flour
Another reason why your starter might be hungry, even if you are feeding it regularly, could be because you are using the wrong flour type. This is a common problem, especially for new starters.
When making a new starter it’s recommended to use flour that hasn’t been bleached and to continue using the exact same flour to feed the starter for the first few weeks. The bleaching process removes a lot of the nutrients that a starter needs in order to develop.
You can switch to feeding it normal flour, but only after your starter has had enough time to develop properly, until then you should use unbleached.
How to Prevent Hooch
Now that we discussed the most common reason why hooch appears in the first place, let’s see what we can do to make sure that it never appears again.
Temperature
The simplest thing that you can do is to move your starter to a place that is slightly colder, but that’s easier said than done, especially during summer, when it’s impossible to find a cool place in the entire house, with the exception of the fridge (which we will discuss in just a moment).
If you find it impossible to find a room with a good temperature, you could instead feed your starter two times per day. Temperature doesn’t affect your starter in any bad way, it just makes it more active and hungrier. This can also be beneficial to you if you are going to use your starter to make bread soon, as the starter will be more active and in better shape.
But if you don’t plan on baking any time soon, and feeding the starter two times per day is too much of a hassle, you can always keep it in the fridge. Storing a starter won’t affect it in any bad way, and it will reduce its activity significantly, so you will only need to feed it once every 2 or 3 weeks (depending on how cold your refrigerator is).
The only downside to keeping your starter in the fridge is that it won’t be able to rise the bread as much. But this can be easily solved by taking the starter out of the fridge, 2 or 3 days before baking.
So, if you have a room with a temperature between 70°F(22°C) and 75°F(24°C), that is where you should be keeping your starter. If you don’t, you can always store it in the fridge, or you can leave it in a warm room and feed it two times per day.
Wrong Feeding Ratio and Measurements
If the feeding ratio was your problem you can simply change it to a proper one and your starter will stop producing hooch right away. But keep in mind that this will most likely alter the texture of the starter, so don’t get scared if in the next few days it will start becoming slightly more solid.
If you want to know more about starter consistencies, and how it affects the bread, you can check out my article: Is my Sourdough Starter the Right Consistency? (Beginner Guide), where I go into more detail about this subject.
And remember that you can use any kind of ratio that you want, as long as the amount of flour that you are adding is equal, or greater than the amount of starter that you are keeping.
If you were weighing the ingredients wrong, get a digital scale so that you can measure them correctly. Unfortunately, there is no way around it, you need a digital scale. While there are graded cups that can tell you how many grams of water or flour you have, they are not good. For example, a cup willed with whole wheat flour is lighter than a cup of white flour, so those graded cups are far from exact.
And the weight of the starter can drastically change based on how much of the sugar and gluten has been consumed, and what flour you’ve been using. So a digital scale is the only way to go.
Improper Flour
The best flour that you can use to make and maintain a sourdough starter is whole grain flour.
Whole grain flour is made using all the parts of the grain, unlike white flour which is made using only one part, and as a result, it has a lot more nutrients. Whole grain also doesn’t undergo any bleaching process, so none of the nutrients are removed.
So for the first few weeks, you should be using whole grain flour, and only after your starter has risen and fallen constantly, without separating, for about a week, you should switch to white flour.
What to Do With the Hooch
Now let’s talk about what you can do with the hooch. You basically have only two options, you can either throw it away, or you can mix it with the rest of the starter. Both options are perfectly fine and won’t affect your starter in a bad way, but they will have a significant impact on the bread made with this starter.
The liquid is a combination of water with alcohol, which resulted from the fermentation process, and it’s very sour. If you mix it in with the rest of the starter, the bread that you will make using this starter will be more sour, than it would have been if you were to throw the liquid away. And if you throw it away, there will be no difference in the bread.
So it basically comes down to how you like your bread, sour or mild, other than that there is no difference.
And if you want to know other ways in which you can make your sourdough bread sourer you should check out this article: 21 Ways to Make Sourdough Bread as Sour as Possible, but if you are interested in a mild, slightly sweet sourdough bread you should check out this article: 21 Ways to Make Sourdough Bread Less Sour Tasting.
Final Thoughts
So, check the temperature and see if this is your problem. If the temperature is fine, have a look at what flour you are using and see if you were using a correct ratio and you were measuring the ingredients the right way.
So, check the temperature and see if this is your problem, if the temperature is fine have a look at what flour you are using and see if you were using a correct ratio and you were measuring the ingredients the right way.
Common Questions
What should I do if my starter has very few bubbles? Bubbles are created by the good bacteria that live in the starter when they eat. Having just a few bubbles means that the starter needs more food, so it requires more flour.
My starter was really active on days 2 and 3, and then there was zero activity. Is this bad? This is a very common thing. Most starters have a surge in activity during the first few days then scale down the activity. After a period it will regulate its activity.
Why is my sourdough starter so sticky? Depending on the amount of flour and water used, sometimes sourdough can become sticky, but this is usually common for starters that have more flour than water.
What is a 100% hydration starter? A 100% Hydration starter is a starter that contains equal parts of flour and water. As the name implies, for every gram of flour there is one gram of water to hydrate it, thus it’s named 100% hydration.
My starter doesn’t rise enough, what should I do? The most common cause for a starter that isn’t rising enough is excessive discarding. If you discard too much of the starter it won’t have enough resources to rise properly.