Last night was first bake. I think I rushed it. My starter just hasn't come alive the way that others have. Starter is 2.5 weeks old. It started out sluggish, but slowly, slowly became more predictable. Still, it never came close to doubling. I had it in the oven w/ the light on, which improved it, not enough, I think. It would take about 8 hours to increase by 50-60% in size. I was v.g. about feeding it every day (by weight), giving it a warm environment, using filtered, warm water. I thought, well, maybe that's just the nature of this particular starter. So I tried a bake. The yellow highlighted areas are extremely dense pockets that are too hard and gummy. (It even gummed up my bread knife). Baked in a dutch oven per Tartine instructions. My gut tells me my starter is too weak AND probably too short a bulk fermentation. It did grow by about 20 percent during BF. I don't know. Today, I went back to my starter and while I usually use the 50/50 white bread flour/whole wheat, I only used half of the 50/50 and the other half, I used rye, thinking I needed to get this this going. Bad idea. My starter is in a coma. It's been more than 12 hours and nothing. 50g starter / 50g bread flour & wheat mixture / 50g rye flour / 90g warm water (not hot). No signs of life, except that it is more acidic tasting now. Disaster.
One thing ive learned from others on this forum is to feed it a higher ratio flour+water ratio leading up to bake day. This really brings it alive with mine.
It's a 1:2:2 ratio.... starter: water: flour.
If you have 50g starter, you'd feed 100g water + 100g flour (preferably organic whole wheat or rye). You'd also do that feeding multiple times before bake day, i believe every 12 hours. Look up the thread on here in search function. There's an article. Sorry, i forgot the details of it but others can chime in with better specifics.