So I've finally got my starter up and going. I've made a couple of recipes (no bread yet) and things are mostly great. I want to keep him at room temperature for at least 2 weeks until I'm sure he's truly stable before I try putting him in the fridge.
Originally I expected to maintain him with 1:1:1 feedings 2x/day (as close to 12 hrs apart as possible but that's not always realistic for me) while keeping it at room temperature. I got that impression from the same places I got the idea I was more or less guaranteed to have a viable starter within 5-7 days. Ha! So, I've kinda thrown that out and learned to trust this forum more.
Here, I see lots of people talking about feeding at larger ratios. Someone told me that 1:5:5 was a good place to shoot for. I tried it with my starter and he seemed to like it. He did great on that ratio for 2 days/4 feedings, more than doubling each time. Then suddenly he stopped being so active. No problem I thought, and adjusted down a bit. 12 hours later he clearly had not peaked yet, so I skipped a feeding. He's looking better now, and ready to be fed again.
Only problem is I'm a little lost as to how much to feed him. I understand it's going to be a bit of a game of trial and error until I figure out what works in this environment. Also that's going to change as the weather gets warmer and more humid.
But I'm sure there are some general guidelines to follow that could help me. I've read some contrasting opinions on if it's best for the starter to rise and fall fully before the next feeding, or if just about at or a bit past peak is best, etc., but I have no idea of the science behind these recommendations.
I guess I'm looking for something of a flow chart to follow during this stage as I'm learning to maintain my starter. If I see this, do that. What I should be aiming for and how to get there. If I want him to be able to respond quickly and vigorously, is there any way I can nudge him in that direction? That kind of thing.
Hey there, I had a ton of trouble on my first time through trying to get a starter going. But have a great routine now with my white and WW starters. It sounds like your starter is very healthy (doubling in size). At this point I would think you can pivot to a mode that lines up with your baking rather than getting the starter going.
I find that my starters do just find for a week or more at a time in the fridge with no feeding. However, when I am ready to bake I need to pull it out at lease a day in advance. If I am baking on Saturday, I will pull it on Friday morning (or noontime if I am home) and let it warm up. It usually does a little rise as it warms up. That night before bed I pull out a small bit of starter and either add it directly to the other ingredients if I am doing a long ferment (overnight) or do something like that 5:1 ratio and then have a big amount of starter to add to my dough in the morning. I then replace the amounts of flour and water I took from my main starter, give it a good mix, and pop it back in the fridge where it slowly munches away on the new food and will be ready (if I know I will be baking again soon, I may leave it out so I have ripe starter at the ready and then I won't have to do this building bit).
Hope that helps. I have done a ton of experimenting with how to get a good amount of ripe starter ready to bake and this has been super successful for me.
Well. The thing is, it only stayed in that healthy state with a good and consistent rise for 2 days, as I stated in my original post. Then the activity slowed almost like it had hit a brick wall. I tried reducing to 1:3:3, and got about the same minimal rise as the previous 1:5:5 feeding. Luckily skipping a feeding got it mostly back on track. But now if I give it a 1:5:5 feeding, which is what worked well for 2 days, it takes several hours before I can even tell it's doing anything, and it's definitely not ready to be fed again at 12 hours.
So I'm playing around with different feeding ratios trying to find something that seems optimal. But I'm a little afraid because even a 1:3:3 feeding ratio takes a long time (maybe roughly 6 hrs) to show any significant rise. Isn't that really going to interfere with the timing of baking bread? I know, watch the dough not the clock. But If I'm expecting something to take 3-4 hours because that's what the recipe says, but it takes 8 hours cuz my starter is being sluggish... I might be asleep when I need to do the next step. And since I'm a total beginner baker, I don't know how well I'll be able to recognize the signs the dough is giving me so I'll have little to go by other than the clock, anyway.
At best, this is going to make baking bread take longer and that makes it harder to fit the schedule around other things like sleeping. At worst I'm going to have very poor results and if I've got too many things off at once, it'll make it hard to identify and correct the issues I'm having. Thus my questions about what I can do to nudge my starter in the direction of being a little quicker and more vigorous.
I'm not keeping my starter in the fridge at the current time. Just want it to be really vigorous and really stable before I do that.
Two questions:
I haven't "baked". I have made naan and pancakes.
When I feed, I dump however much is leftover after I take how much I need for the new feeding ratio. For example, if I'm feeding 1:5:5, I use 5g starter, 25g each water & flour. I'm using KA AP flour now, altho I did use whole wheat earlier in the process.
So, it should be ok, but I am a bit worried that just keeping 5 grams, it is almost like you are starting over. When I got mine to start rising like you described it was doing before, I probably had about 150-200g of starter. I would pull out 50g to make bread and replace with 25g flour and 25g water and put it back in the fridge. It seemed very happy with that arrangement.
What you might want to try is take the 55g total starter you have and mix it with 100g flour and 100g water. Put that in a container with enough headroom for it to at lease double and cover it. Then leave it out for 12-24 hours and see if increases in volume (it may rise and then recede, that is normal). Once you do that, you will have ~250g of starter that you can begin a baking routine with like I described above. Otherwise, you may not have much active culture and may need to start over.
I'm curious how long you have been working with sourdough? And on what are you basing the advice to not use a small amount of starter?
As far as I understand it, the science should work out to mean that as long as the ratios are the same, it should not matter if I do a 1:5:5 feeding as 5g:25g:25g or 1000g:5000g:5000g, assuming proper mixing procedures are observed with both. I see people recommending all over the place that it is possible to maintain a very small amount of starter. Reducing discard and waste of flour is the most common reason given. But the point is, it seems to work for a lot of people.
According to the article I'll link below, there are about 50 million yeasts and 5 billion Lactobacilli bacteria in a teaspoon of starter, and I'd say when I weigh out 5g of my starter, that is very roughly a teaspoon in volume. I think that's plenty to start a new colony in the still relatively small environment (55g total, or very roughly 1/4 cup in volume) I end up with after I feed. That's nothing like starting over.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-biology-of-sourdough
I've had a successful starter going for 6 months, though I have been baking a lot, ~5-7 loaves a week during much of that time. So roughly 100-150 loaves.
Good luck!