search

Found

info Overview

Work out starter, flour and water in grams from either the starter you have or the total you want, with an adjustable feeding ratio and hydration.

📘 How to Use

  1. Choose "By starter amount" or "By target total"
  2. Enter the starter you have or the total weight you want
  3. Drag the flour and water ratio sliders to read the gram amounts

Sourdough Starter Feeding Calculator

g

Weight of starter you have, e.g. 30-100 g

5×
1 12
5×
1 12

A 1:5:5 starter-flour-water ratio is common

bakery_dining Results

Total

— g

Starter

— g

Flour

— g

Water

— g

Hydration

— %

※ Built on a starter:flour:water ratio of 1:your parts. Weights rounded to grams.

※ Hydration = water ÷ flour × 100; equal flour and water gives 100%.

※ The larger the flour and water parts, the more food the starter gets and the longer it takes to peak (rule of thumb).

grid_view Related

Article

Sourdough Starter Feeding Calculator | Grams from Any Feeding Ratio

Work out starter, flour and water in grams from either the starter you already have or the total you want before baking, with an adjustable feeding ratio and the resulting hydration. It supports common feeds like 1:5:5 and keeps everything in the grams a kitchen scale reads.

💡 About this tool

The part of maintaining a sourdough starter that trips people up is the math: given what is left in the jar, how much flour and water do you add? A feeding ratio is always written starter : flour : water, so 1:5:5 means one part starter fed with five parts flour and five parts water. The numbers are by weight, not volume, because a cup of flour weighs about 120 g while a cup of water weighs roughly 226 g — measure by cups and the ratio drifts. This tool keeps every field in grams so the scale and the screen agree.

It works two ways. "By starter amount" starts from the discard or seed you have on hand and tells you the flour and water to add. "By target total" runs it backwards: set the final weight your recipe needs and it back-solves the starter, flour and water that get you there. The two sliders move flour and water independently from 1 to 12 parts, so you can dial in a 100% hydration feed (equal flour and water) or a firmer, stiffer starter from the same screen.

🧐 Frequently asked questions

Is 1:1:1 or 1:5:5 better? Both have equal flour and water, so both are 100% hydration — the difference is how much food the starter gets. The larger the last two numbers, the more flour and water, and the longer it takes to peak. Bakers feeding twice a day at room temperature often settle on 1:4:4 to 1:5:5; bake more often and 1:1:1 to 1:2:2 keeps things quick.

Why measure in grams instead of cups? Feeding ratios are weight-based. Liquids are denser than solids, so a cup of water and a cup of flour are not the same weight, and a ratio measured by volume simply will not hold. Inputs and results here are all in grams.

How is hydration worked out? Hydration = water ÷ flour × 100. Equal grams of flour and water give 100%. Set the water parts lower than the flour parts and you get a firmer, lower-hydration starter.

What about the discard? Discard is the portion you remove before feeding. If you never reduce the starter and only keep adding food, the total balloons and the flour and water it needs grows with it. Removing some resets the acidity and size, and keeping only a small seed before feeding cuts the waste.

📚 Baker's percentage, in one number

Hydration is bakers borrowing their own shorthand: flour is treated as 100% and every other ingredient is expressed against it. A starter with equal flour and water is "100% hydration" by the same logic, which is why the figure travels so well — double or halve the recipe and the ratio holds, and bakers worldwide read it the same way. It also dovetails with dough math: a 100% hydration starter is exactly half flour and half water by weight, so you can fold its contribution straight into a loaf's overall hydration.