Newbie question about bleached flour and starter
Hi everyone, totally new to baking artisan bread but I love it so far. I wanted to jump into sourdough as soon as I was having good results with baking using active dry yeast in the packets so yesterday I started my starter mix. I used Gold Medal bleached APF. I since did some researching and no matter how much I look can't find the answer to my question so wanted to join and ask here as most of the search results usually bring up "The Fresh Loaf" forum.
I have read that you CANNOT use bleached flour b/c there are NO yeast on the grains (makes sense to me) and your starter will NEVER start.
I've also read you CAN use bleached flour but might not get good results.
And lastly I've read you CAN use bleached flour and get great results.
So you can imagine a new person is confused by this. I checked my starter today, not even 24 hours after starting it with bleached flour and it had developed what I have deemed to be "hooch" which I stirred back in. A few hours later it was bubbling and growing at only the 24 hour mark (and not fed yet) which I have never read will happen so I'm even more confused and kind of pumped about honestly (take that science!). I started another starter with King Arthur APF that is unbleached and as I was going to throw out the first one until I saw all the activity and smelled it. It has a wonderful sweet smell that is VERY nice so I didn't want to throw it out, I figured I'd just continue on in the face of what I have read and see what happens.
Now brings me to my question, which information is correct and which is not about using bleached flour??? Here is what I don't really get, If you want to cultivate your own local wild yeast, why would you use an unbleached flour that already has wild yeast on it from wherever it was produced? This seems like a contradiction to me. I read "grow your own wild yeast, but start with an unbleached flour b/c it already has yeast on it", huh? I get that, but I also get that if the flour was produced in TX and you live in OH, how are you cultivating your own local sourdough yeast if you use flour with yeast already on it? In contrast if you use bleached flour that has killed all the local yeast at the production plant like I have and it is growing, how can that be anything but my local wild yeast right? Seems like using bleached flower would be the only way to get 100% local yeast unless you live in the same town that the flour mill is at.
Anyway just saying hi and hoping someone that is much more experienced can answer my questions for me as I'm super confused. I feel the need to "throw out" my first batch b/c of using the bleached flour, but again, seems like it is doing exactly what it is suppose to do in spite of all I've read, and "should" be nothing but local yeast which is what I want.