Hi Sierra, I'm sorry I wasn't able to respond to your question in a more timely fashion! I hope by now your starter is rising again and you're happily baking sourdough bread. Assuming your starter wasn't exposed to chemicals or anything toxic, the one thing that can suddenly kill a starter is extreme heat (140ºF). If you're confident that your starter didn't get that hot, then I suspect it just got sluggish and will likely bounce back. If you happen to be setting your starter in a sunny window, this could cause a "greenhouse effect" that heats up the starter more than is desireable, so you may need to shift it out of the sun. If your starter is back to bubbling, but isn't rising as well as it used to, then you may find adjusting the ratio of ingredients helpful. As temperatures get warmer you may notice that your starter tends to rise and fall more rapidly. If you observe that your starter is falling significantly between feedings, this can lead to more sluggish yeast activity. In that case, offering your starter a relatively larger feeding, by increasing the ratio of flour and water fed (as compared to sourdough starter) will tend to slow down fermentation. For example, if you're following our sourdough starter recipe, which calls for equal parts by weight of starter, water, and flour (1:1:1), you might want to try a 1:2:2 ratio, or even 1:3:3. The goal is to be able to replenish (feed) your starter when it's at its peak of rising or just beginning to fall when you're maintaining it at room temperature, while still being able to limit feedings to twice a day. If you're worried about using up too much flour with this feeding routine, it's fine to scale down the starter amount, but keep the flour and water amounts the same: 1/4 cup (2 ounces, 57g) starter + 1/2 cup (4 ounces, 113g) water + 1 scant cup (4ounces, 113g) flour. And, you can even maintain a smaller starter, in which case a 1:2:2 feeding might look like: 12g starter + 24g water + 24g flour. I hope this helps! Let us know how it goes! 

Barb

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