Newbie question- sorry if it sounds silly.
My 100% hyd. (wwf+apf) starter is in the refrigerator, fed once a week.
Feeding day: I remove from refrigerator, discard n feed it as follows:
Starter: 40g
Water: 30g
Flour: 40g
So, I reduced hydration to 75% when I noticed the consistency was more liquidy and it sinks rather than float. But still shows good activity (rise to 1/3 in volume within 1st 5 hours after feeding) and now back in the refrigerator.
Before baking day: I now have a recipe that calls for building a 100% hydration levain 12hrs in advance. I remove 10g of starter from refrigerator and feed it as follows:
APF - 15g
Water - 20g
So my refrigerator starter (1: 1: .75) has become (1:1.5:2) or 1:2:2?...
Do I even need to balance it out this way everytime before building the levain or am I good to just feed it 1:2:2 or higher to get a 100% hydration levain?
Then why are you still discarding? You'll have to find a maintenance procedure where there is no discard. Keeping a small amount of starter, taking a little off to build with each time and then topping your starter back up when it runs low is a good way to manage without the need to discard.
Now if you have a 75% hydration starter in your fridge and you need a 100% hydration levain then you can either do one or the other.
1. Use a small amount of starter to inoculate a lot. The amount it'll be off will be so small that it'll hardly be worth worrying about.
2. if you take 17.5g starter (you can take 17g and don't worry about the 0.5g, I only use this as an example) then you'll have 10g flour + 7.5g water for a 75% hydration starter. Now simply feed enough flour and water to bring them back to being equal.
Say you want 100g starter @ 100% hydration. So your final levain should be 50g flour + 50g water. You take off 17.5g starter which has 10g flour + 7.5g water. So simply feed that with 40g flour + 42.5g water. Allow that to mature and voila!
I do the same for any hydration starter. If ones starter is 80% hydration then taking off 18g = 10g flour + 8g water. Then simply feed accordingly.
of water. 100 g of 100 hydration levain has 50 g each of flour and water. Whether it has 1 more gram of flour than it should makes no difference to me but others might want to add the exact amount of flour and water to get it perfect by adding on more gam of water than flour. I would just chuck in 45 g each of flour and water and call it a day. I don't think the wee beasties ar smart enough to know the difference:-).
from someone who want's to skip parts of the learning curve - a phase I still remember. If you're like most people (including me), you'll find it quicker and easier to move along said curve if you focus on one thing at a time. So, in this instance, you'd almost certainly be better served by learning the characteristics of your current starter and using it until you can consistently produce a variety of loaves with it than by also trying to learn about different starter hydrations at the same time.
You might also want to revisit how baker's math works. Feeding 40 g of 100% starter with 30 g water + 40 g flour converts it 83.3% (50 gm total water / 60 gm total flour), not 75%.
and I'll proceed with the hope that my beasties are not as smart as Dabrowns. Thanks for the detailed explanation Lechem.
I'll blame my nerves on a lot of theoretical reading without much practical experience ... 100g of fed starter gives me an option to plunge into baking the moment I see a workable recipe while my unfed collection keeps steady a supply of sourdough crackers for now .. someday when I'm more familiar with the sourdough baking world, I'll work like you seniors do with a small amount of an occasionally neglected starter. Thanks!