Removing the need for starter discard by feeding from fridge
Hello everyone.
I've started doing something recently that I haven't seen anywhere online before, I've seen a bunch of youtube videos and articles about reducing waste or using your sourdough discard for something, but haven't seen anyone talk about my method, so I wonder if there's a reason not to do it (most likely I just haven't looked in the right places and this is more common than I think xD).
My starter is about 1 year old, and I used to at first regularly feed it every day, then i started putting it in the fridge, take it out and feed it for 2 days before baking with it (I bake about once a week) and then putting it back. Recently I stopped taking out the whole starter to refresh everything. I just take out about a tablespoon or 10g of starter from the fridge into a new container and I create a new batch there with a 1:5:5 ratio.
So the way I bake now is I wake up in the morning, take out a sample from the fridge and mix it, wait until that has doubled and then make my bread with that, bread ferments over the day and I put it in the fridge to proof overnight and bake the next day.
This way I have 0 sourdough discard. Once my fridge batch is out, I simply do the same thing as if I would bake, but instead of baking with it I put it back in the fridge for future use.
I have no discernible difference in the final product with this method from my past methods of refreshing for a few days or daily feeding.
Can anyone think of a reason not to do this?
I take out a spoonful and build my levain up over two days. Every once and a while I pour the hooch off the starter and give it a small feeding, maybe 30 gr of water and 30 flour
Plenty of us follow a very similar, if not this exact, technique. What you have discovered is called a "levain" which is basically an off-shoot starter that goes into the final dough and leavens the bread. The starter in the fridge is used as seed only and always kept separate.
Sounds similar to the No Muss No Fuss (https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/40918/no-muss-no-fuss-starter). DaBrownMan did a lot of study on this topic.