Pineapple vs water
I started my first starter a week ago. I decided to go with the pineapple juice method because for some reason I thought it would work better.
I followed this method http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/10901/pineapple-juice-solution-part-2 [1]. But I must admit that I might have misread the instructions because I don't know imperial measures. So I'm pretty sure I added too much water as I measured it by volume equal to the volume of the flour. But I thought I got the starter to flour ratio right, which was 1:1/2.
I ended up starting 3 starters with pineapple juice. I kept only the youngest one and finally worked out the correct ratios and started weighing the ingredients. Today it had totally taken off and last time I checked it had nearly doubled in size. This is day 7.
I also started a starter with the water a few days after the starter described above. And to me it seems to rise equally well even though I started it 3 days later (today is day 4). But what's more surprising is that I can smell the yeast in that one, but the pineapple one just smells sour, can't detect any yeast.
As an experiment it's totally flawed of course, because I didn't use the same method for both and fed the water starter more, sooner. But I'd be interested to know if anyone else has compared them and what their observations were?