The 2 Countries Where You Can Drop Your Sourdough Starter Off At Daycare

Fresh baked sourdough is many things — it's chewy, light, tangy, crusty, bubbly and fluffy. But it can also be a pain to make, especially if you maintain your own living sourdough starter. To keep it active, you need to feed it every day, which becomes cumbersome pretty quickly. If you live in Sweden or Denmark, however, you can drop your starter off at a daycare when you need some time off.

The idea is thought to have originated in Sweden, though no one really knows who first came up with it. Around 2013, the owners of a Stockholm bakery, RC Café (formerly RC Chocolat), decided to start offering a sourdough hotel service to travelers. The business has multiple locations, including an 24-hour outpost at Arlanda Airport, where people can drop off their starters before boarding their flights and pick it up upon their return. 

RC Café didn't really plan the initiative as a money-making scheme, it just wanted to help fellow bakers. For just $3 a day or $12 per week, RC Café makes sure all of the sourdough starters under its care stay alive and healthy by regularly feeding and discarding them to maintain size. Another sourdough care service popped up elsewhere in the city a few years later, but has since closed. The only other place that seems to have kept up the concept is The Sourdough Inn in Denmark. 

Located just outside Copenhagen in Ørestad, Denmark, The Sourdough Inn is a pop-up bread shop and sourdough hotel. People can drop their starters off there, or the inn will organize a bike pick up if they live close enough. With prices starting at DKK 299 or $47 per week, the team feeds any starters in their care on a consistent schedule and ensures they stay at an optimal temperature to maintain activity until the owners return. 

If you have a starter that needs some extra help, you can even check it into the inn for rehabilitation services, where a specialist will provide it with the healthy diet and extra stirrings it needs to come back to life. The Sourdough Inn also offers training programs and virtual starter diagnostics, too. The Sourdough Inn actually first opened in Brooklyn, New York, in 2015 but it moved in 2020, leaving the U.S. without an official sourdough daycare.

While there may not be an official sourdough hotel in the U.S., people have been known someone to act as a sourdough sitter while they're away – and some local bakeries offer the service too. The easiest thing to do, however, is to just stick the starter in the fridge while you're away, where it can survive without feeding for up to two months. If you have a foolproof sourdough starter, it shouldn't be too hard to bring it back to life.