Hi Barb!

My husband and I kept a successful starter that we got behind on feeding. Both of us got busy with school and work and found ourselves forgetting to maintain the feeding schedule, so we put it into the fridge. Welp, a couple of days turned into weeks, and weeks turned into months. Let’s just say it had been over 6 months since we even thought about it (it was in the veeerry back of our fridge). We pulled it out today and it had a pretty steady layer of dark brown hooch on the top, but no signs of mold. There was no super strong alcohol smell; it honestly just smelled like a hungry starter. We tried to salvage the starter from the bottom, scraping all the brown funk off the top. Here’s a picture of what it looked like poured into a new container for mixing: https://tinyurl.com/t9t5w8e
You can still see streaks of the brown stuff. We went ahead and weighed and fed to regular starter ratio with water and while wheat flour.
Did we make a mistake in trying to save this home-lab experiment? Do you think it’ll be unsafe to make bread from?

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