Hey, Jim here. Hello to all. I am starting a new sourdough culture, and I expect I will be picking brains. My grandmother had a sourdough culture that she kept alive for nearly 3 ZILLION years. When she passed, a brain dead family member tossed it. I am now back to square one. Into my second week. Lots of hooch, but the culture remains watery. Should I cut back on water & just add flour for a few days? It's just not spongy as I expected it to become. I'm using two 1/2 gallon mason jars. Every morning, a layer of alcohol; so I know it's alive & well. Any input. Thanks. Jim
Make sure you feed it equal parts of flour and water by weight, not volume. If you are still getting a lot of alcohol on top, add more flour. There is no fast rule on starting and maintaining a starter. I used to measure everything religiously for maintenance, now I just toss in flour and water just making sure it is plenty thick. Then I let it sit for a bit and once I see it being active, I toss it in the fridge where it lives until I need a bit to make bread.
Now when I am making a Levain to bake, I do measure carefully. I take a bit from my thick starter and build that up until I have enough for my recipe. Lately I have done a 1:2:2 feeding (starter:water:flour) with bran for about 24 hours,stirring every 8 hours, then feeding it 1:4:5 with bread flour for the final build which gives me an 80% hydration levain. The feeding with the bran shows practically no action but the second feeding with the bread flour makes it triple. I am playing around with this method right now.
You will soon find something that works for you. We all do things differently and if you hang around here for a while, you will find yourself constantly experimenting. It is a deep dark hole that we all fall into after getting hooked on TFL. ?
Oh one more thing, is your starter rising and falling? Then you know for sure that it is active. The look of the starter changes according to hydration, so a thin starter may be very bubbly where a thick one is not on the surface but is under it.
Hope this helps!
ETA. By the way, you don’t need to keep a huge amount of starter. 2 half gallon jars sounds huge unless you are baking commercially. Most of us keep half a cup to a cup of starter. Some keep only 100 grams. You can always build up if you need more.