• Reply by GinaG on February 13, 2012 at 6:46 pm
• 

Dear Susan

You very adeptly describe how so many, many people feel.

The reason why you remove a cup is to "replenish" or "refresh" the starter to promote activity. Although there is quite the authority on sourdough who dismisses this practice, I recommend as most sourdough fans on this forum that you do refresh until you acquire more experience with your starter.

These sites are very educational on the subject of starters:

http://www.sourdo.com/

WWW.Northwestsourdough.com

Also, the second is an excellent source for recipes and ideas on what to do with that cup of starter you haven't the heart to toss. Every recipe comes with appropriate baking-porn. Have a gander.

I hope to hear how you do!
GinaG.

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• Reply by placebo on February 14, 2012 at 12:09 am
• 

The general idea is to feed the starter enough to at least double the amount. For instance, if you're keeping one cup of starter, you'd feed it one cup of flour and half a cup of water. If instead, you have two cups of starter, you'd feed it two cups of flour and a cup of water. You have to keep everything in proportion. If you don't constantly remove starter, the amount quickly becomes unwieldy. So you might be thinking you could just feed it one cup of flour every time. If you do that, you'll end up starving the starter. It'll get really sour and unhealthy.

The ideal way to cut down on waste is to keep only a small amount of starter. I keep only 1/4 cup. When I feed it, I'm only discarding a small amount. The tradeoff is that when you want to bake, you need to build up the amount of starter so you'll have enough, so you have to plan a day ahead.

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• Reply by stevenc12 on February 19, 2012 at 4:23 am
• 

Welcome to a very big club. I have seen a lot of messages protesting the "waste" of throwing away starter rather than using it.

I suspect that professional bakeries don't though any away. But, then, they are baking 100 or 1000 loves a day. Because the home baker is doing one or two at a time, you just can't use it all. (I have seen recipes for sourdough pancakes that uses some of the starter that would otherwise be thrown away.)

I have seen at least one site mention that if you just keep feeding it and don't throw any away, after a few weeks, your starter will fill your home swimming pool.

Throwing some (most) away keeps the acid level of the starter down (which will kill the yeast eventually) and gets rid of the hootch that also will eventually do bad things to the starter.

I'm afraid that you'll need to steel yourself that keeping a sourdough starter requires you to throw most of it away.

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• Reply by GinaG on February 19, 2012 at 12:37 pm
• 

Stevenc12,

I suppose it's a good thing that what we per lb for a bit of flour and some water isn't as expensive as gasoline...Or we probably would see some sourdough swimming pools! LOL!

GinaG.

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