Understanding newborn starter maintenance
Hiee :-)
I tried making a wild yeast starter over a year ago and after two failed attempts (lack of patience) gave up. Now again i am bit by the bug and am on the 2nd week (10th day) of my new starter. This time i loaded myself on patience and seem to be doing well so far.
I scoured the web and tried to equip myself with thorough reading on sourdough and also articles posted by Debra Wink. All seems well with my starter but few basic questions which i am unable to get help on.
This starter was created with freshly squeezed pineapple juice and fresh ground whole wheat flour. I was discarding n feeding it in 24hrs cycle as 2 oz of starter + 1 oz of water + 1 oz of wheat flour till a day ago and lately I saw it would double in about 12 hours.
Now from today 1oth day - I changed it to 1 oz starter + 1 oz water + 1 oz flour.
As a 2nd step now I want to understand the maintenance of this starter as I believe it seems to be developing well. I went thru this link [1] (of dlstanf2) and was trying to understand the maths and hydration etc. He has mentioned about how much flour and water to take to reach a certain hydration, which looks quite helpful.
What I didn't get was how much of starter to add to it to maintain that hydration ? Will try to understand this by an example again from the same link [1] :
for 67% hydration - I should take 20 gr water and 30 gr flour - however, I am clueless on how much starter I should add to this ? (I am mathematically challenged :( and hope my question doesn't have something to do with that - that teeny weeny feeling inside tells me it must be some calculation part that i am missing on).
My starter is yet to develop its full potential and I am trying to understand the feeding/maintenance that will help me grow it well. It will be helpful if someone can guide me to a one day/24 hr feeding cycle that will yeild a robust active starter.
I am not so rigid on whole wheat flour or AP flour, I had fresh ground whole wheat flour handy and so have been using it for the starter.