A much less exciting day yesterday. As you can see from the above pic from the morning, we're getting some good gas production, but it's gotten quite thin, so it might not be able to trap the gas and actually rise. I can't tell from the side pic if it rose and fell overnight or not.
Much less impressive activity when I went to feed it last night, but you can see from the foam that we're still bubbling away. I think we're getting some serious alcohol production, which is contributing to the thinness. I've heard some people pour off the hooch, but I've never done it.
Instead of using half the previous starter when feeding, I'll be going with 1:1:1 by volume to try to thicken it up, but I'm considering switching to 1:1:1 by weight as per one of my books, King Arthur, and probably our benevolent mod @[email protected].
1:1:1 is pretty standard. It’s always by weight. If you go by volume you will have way too much water ( it’s denser than flour).
I pour off the hooch because it’s just yucky waste products.
After doing some searching, hydration ratios matter, but also kinda don't. Here's a good article on the topic. You can find entirely too much information on the topic here.
By weight is pretty standard, so I'll probably split this into 2, so we can observe the differences.
The only thing I really wanted to demonstrate with this series is that you don't need anything more than flour and water. Since I was doing this anyways, I figured I might as well share the process and show how simple and easy it is. Also this community needs some activity!
I'm very excited to get to baking with the starter(s) when they're ready!