Confused about feeding ratios

I am no expert, but yes,  work the ratio, then the total amount you need at the end, and work backwards.  So if you want to have 200 grams of starter at 1:1:1,  discard all but 66, then add 66 water and 66 flour, and you will be at 199.  I don't bake with sourdough all that much, but I have been feeding mine for quite some time, so I keep a much smaller quantity,  5 or 10 grams  is what I start with, then add the same water and flour.  

If it works for you, it is the right way.  I use the ratio of 1:1:1.  That works for me.

Ford

I feed my Starter a 1:1:1 ratio and I have a great Starter.

I feed 100g Starter with 100g water and 100g 50/50 bread and wholemeal flour.

If it works for you the way you feed your starter do not change it.:)

Hi Chell,

This reply is more involved than the question you asked about ratios. I hope it's helpful in the larger context of your delving into the world of starters. There are probably as many ways of keeping a starter as there are bakers in the world. It's good to hear what other people do. But in the end, it's mostly personal choice that should also take into account basic info on what keeps a starter happy. In other words, it's a learning process and using what you learn to find a method that works for you and the circumstances of your life.

For a few years after baking school and working in a bakery, I was really confused about how to keep my starter happy when I wasn't refreshing it and using it to bake bread on a daily basis. I saw people using methods involving refrigeration and feeding once a week or whatever. Yet I knew that most experts were against refrigeration. At the same time, daily feeding regimens I discovered for keeping a starter at room temp all seemed to discard larger amounts of starter than I wanted to waste and use large amounts of flour that would be part of the next day's discard. Costly! So I worked out a way of keeping it in the fridge and feeding at regular intervals. It sort of worked. The effect of cold on sourdough micro-organisms, both yeast and bacteria, is a complex topic. They can survive. Whether they thrive or not, is another issue. I found that mine would lose vigour over time and every now and then, I would have to take it through a week or two of serious reinvigoration - basically treat it like a brand new starter.

Here's what I ended up with almost a decade later after keeping an open mind, reading and experimenting. I keep my starter at 50% hydration. It's only 15 grams in weight. Every single day at about the same time, I take 6 grams of it to feed and discard 9 grams. My frugal nature is content with that minimal "waste." The feeding aka refreshing - or inoculation as people seem to be calling these days - is with 3 grams of water at 90 degrees F and 6 grams of whole grain flour. I make my own breakfast and feed my starter; it's just part of my routine now.  I keep it wrapped in plastic wrap in a small container at room temperature. When I travel, it's not hard to find room for that in my luggage along with a supply of organic whole grain flour.

I put the word "waste" in quotes above because on the the days I want to make bread (or something else), I take that 9 grams that would otherwise have been discarded, add however much water is needed to bring it to the hydration level called for in the recipe. And then I elaborate it, i.e. build it over at least two feedings over 16 to 24 hours to get the amount of starter called for in the recipe.

The flour I use for feeding my starter on a daily basis is whole grain organic rye. I find it more reliable to work with because it's higher in nutrients and fermentable sugars than white flours. In any case, the minuscule amount of rye flour in the 9 grams of starter that I elaborate for any given formula has never added any off taste in breads formulated to be all-wheat or whatever. And the starter doesn't seem to have any trouble metabolizing other flours.

Best wishes, apprentice

I keep my starter as a ~60% lump of rye in my fridge. I pinch a small piece off, build it up to the required volume of 100% hydration preferment over the course of 3 feedings in 8 hours, then use that to inoculate my dough. When I am close to running out of starter, I build my starter back up to about 150gr weight. This way, I'm not throwing out starter every time I feed it. No waste, AND I only have to feed my starter once every 10 weeks or so. Much less fiddly than keeping a wet starter, in my opinion. If the preferment i'm building won't double in 4-5 hours after the second feeding, then I refresh my starter. This generally starts happening at the 8-10 week mark.    

EDIT: I do what the gentleman above me does. He explained it better. 

My starter began its life as the sour for a Jewish deli-type rye, and that is how I have continued to maintain it. I bake a rye loaf about once a week, using a three-stage build that begins with 75g of the sour. At the last of the three stages I take about 75g of the newly/triply-refreshed sour and put it back in the sour jar - so the quantity cancels itself out and the starter gets a nice meal. If I need starter for something other than the regular rye loaf I just take a small amount of this and use it to inoculate whatever levain I'm building. There's roughly 150g in the jar, give or take, so that leaves me some margin for error; I can always replenish by building a little extra at the next rye bake. Or if find I've been using up a lot of it with no rye bake in sight, I'll give it a straight feed of rye flour and water, 1:1, to top it up as it were. This isn't very scientific, but it works for me, and I don't have to worry and fuss. Starter seems happy and very lively, and it comes up to full strength pretty quickly after one of these auxiliary feedings. I keep it at 100%, and it lives in the fridge between bakes; my normal rye sour build includes a very small amount of fermented Altes (I keep this going in a jar in the fridge, too, and I guess it's become a culture in its own right), so a tiny bit of that ends up going back into the starter and I suspect gives it some extra kick.

But firstly - if what you're doing works for you, then keep doing it!

I bake (mostly) daily. My mothers live in the fridge. I take from them what I need and top them up immediately then put them back into the fridge. When I'm not using them - like now, not baking for some 4 days in a row, they just live there undisturbed. They are slowly working themselves and I know that on Sunday night when I come to use them they will be a little "riper" than usual. I can live with that.

Feeding involves adding back in exactly what I take out - if I take out 200g then I put back 200g - made up of 100g of flour and 100g of water for both the wheat and spelt starters which are maintained at 100% The Rye starter is maintained at 150% so typically I'd remove 250g and replace it with 100g rye flour and 150g water. The quantity of starter left in the jar have never entered my equations regarding (re) feeding them. The jars have about 500g of starter in them. The most I'll take out is 380g.

For Mondays bake, I'll probably make 8 small what based loaves. That needs about 850g of active starter, so mid. Sunday afternoon, I'll take 170g of mother out of the jar, add to that 340g flour and 340g water, mix and leave it in the warming cupboard - then top-up the mother jar with 85g flour and 85g water and back into the fridge it goes.

And that seems to work for me. Does the bread vary in flavour? Probably a little but for the most part no-one seems to notice. I don't know the last time I actually threw any starter away.

Cheers,

-Gordon

If your methods are working for you and you're happy with the results, carry on. My comments above were never intended to "correct" other notions. Since chell is new to this wonderful activity, however, I thought s/he might like to know there is another way of looking at the topic based on the advice of bakers far more experienced and knowledgeable than any of us. Jeffrey Hamelman, for example, states categorically that using cold storage as a long-term strategy for sourdough maintenance is not the most effective means of keeping a culture in optimum health.

This is not just JH's opinion, btw. It's based on his vast experience, to be sure, but also on the most current scientific research. He is the first to acknowledge that the subject has been incompletely studied. But what is known with certainty is that the micro-organisms in a starter are living things with optimal conditions for thriving. Like human beings, they appreciate being fed regularly (daily) and kept within a certain temperature range. Under the stress of cold storage and infrequent feedings, they go through a multitude of changes to try and survive, none of which do any favours for our bread. He notes that it's common for cultures thus kept to require so much remedial feeding before they're suitable for bread baking, that one could just as easily start over with a new culture each time you bake. He does, however, offer an example involving some refrigeration for the occasional baker who wants to make bread once a week. If interested, check out his appendix in Bread (2nd edition) on developing and perpetuating a culture.

I was one of those who kept a culture in cold storage that routinely produced good and, occasionally, some fine bread. But it also needed remedial attention from time to time. I hadn't come across Hamelman's suggested maintenance routine for baking once a week. Don't think it was in the first edition, and the second hadn't been published. So I did lots of research after yet another round of remediation, tested my starter to make sure it was completely reinvigorated and then set about duplicating, on a very small scale, how we kept our starter healthy at baking school - only without baking on a daily basis. As noted previously, this results in my discarding about 4.5 grams of flour/day.

But ... why discard at all? Because if you're feeding your starter on a daily basis but baking infrequently, you would soon have enough sourdough culture to fill a circus tent. Especially if you hold the opinion that you should feed a culture its own weight in both flour and water every single time. That's a good practice, of course, when you're developing a brand-new culture, along with discarding half or more of the initial/previous mix in order to keep quantities workable. This gets your new culture off to a vigorous start. But no expert opinion I've ever come across has suggested a ratio of 1:1:1 as the best or only way to go for refreshing or building/elaborating a mature culture.

And why go to the trouble of feeding my little starter some flour every single day and with water at a certain temperature? Well, I haven't heard anyone say that micro-organisms are sentient, so I don't think I need to feel guilty about the years of cold storage and infrequent feedings. But after a while, I got fed up with bucking nature. As bakers, we're working with living micro-organisms that have their ideal conditions. It's the same in gardening, wine or beer-making, producing kombucha, cheese or whatever. I figure, for instance, if I'm going to put a sun-loving plant in the garden, it would be counter-productive to stick it in the shade.

I have tons and tons more to learn about what keeps the micro-organisms in my culture happy and, in turn, how to use what I'm learning to manipulate temperature, hydration, etc. to coax different flavour profiles from those babies. For me, that's the joy of baking: the learning that never stops. To each, his or her own both in terms of method and results.