Nancy Silverton Says This Common Sourdough Starter Problem Doesn’t Mean It’s Dead

Three weeks ago, I tried to cultivate my own sourdough starter for the first time. Sourdough baking didn’t call to me in 2020, but in 2026, as a bored 29-year-old in need of a new culinary project, I felt compelled to give it a go. After a week of feeding my starter daily, carefully following instructions I’d found online, and growing increasingly concerned about the thick layer of clear liquid that kept forming on top, I abandoned the project, assuming I’d failed to create anything safe for consumption. But according to chef Nancy Silverton, I may have been too quick to toss my burgeoning starter.

Early in her now-legendary career, Silverton earned widespread acclaim for her bread at La Brea Bakery in Los Angeles, where customers lined up for hours to get their hands on one of her famous sourdough loaves. Although the original La Brea location has since closed, you can still buy its bread at grocery chains like Whole Foods and Kroger. Or you could bake a loaf of La Brea sourdough yourself.

La Brea and Silverton recently announced the launch of the bakery’s new Sourdough Starter Kit Collection, available exclusively on TikTok Shop. This kit includes everything you need to bake a batch of La Brea bread, including a Dutch oven, bread flour, a glass jar for your starter, and even dried La Brea Bakery sourdough starter that you can activate and use to bake. Silverton wants to make sourdough baking more accessible for home cooks, and she sat down with Food & Wine to guide me through her essential tips for growing and keeping a starter alive.

Silverton makes it clear that growing a sourdough starter is about trusting the process. She emphasizes that “You gotta stick with it.” If your starter has a layer of clear liquid on top — like mine — the chef and baker notes that it doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t alive. She suggests draining the liquid and giving it more time.

Silverton cultivated her first sourdough starter with the help of grapes, which she added because “the sticky skins of the grapes were a great landing place to capture wild yeast.” However, she points out that you don’t need to use grapes, and growing a starter with just flour and water will work perfectly fine.

When growing her original starter, the chef made most of her decisions based on instinct. “I thought, after 10 days, ‘Okay, I think I’ve waited long enough, and now I’m ready to go.’ And so what I did is I strained [the grapes], and I started adding in fresh flour, which is food for that starter.” She shares that a bad odor, off-colored liquid, or an ugly appearance are not necessarily signs that you’ve killed the ferment.

Most importantly, Silverton says, “You only know it’s alive by the bubbles.” She emphasizes that you need to see activity in the sourdough starter before using it, and “you won’t see activity if you don’t have the right amount of flour.” In the early stages of cultivating a starter, Silverton even feeds it three times a day to ensure the yeast has enough food to grow.

If you’re stressed about the status of your own starter, follow Silverton’s advice and give it a little more time — and make sure it has enough food. Or if you don’t want to make a starter from scratch, you can get a sample of La Brea’s own dried starter in its new sourdough kit, activate it at home, and then keep feeding it plenty of flour.