Hi PJ, Thank you for this post and your experiments, timely now for me as I have quite a bit of starter in various stages of growth--mostly rest!--in the refrigerator. I've been successfully using sourdough and discard in bread, cinnamon rolls, English muffins, and other fine KAF recipes. Since by now I have a fair amount of starter to play with and I don't want to add more to my stash, I'd like to just add enough flour and water by weight (keeping 100% hydration) to the starter so that after 7-8 hours or so I end up with just enough to make 1 cup of starter, instead of measuring out 1 cup of starter from a larger quantity and having discard (I'd pad a bit for waste). Then to this 1 cup I would add the 1.5 cups water and 3 c flour and proceed with the rest of the recipe. Any thoughts on this?

I can do the math easily, but I was just wondering if after you discarded a cup from your initial jar, did you begin with an amount of starter that kept equal weights of the starter/flour/water? Maybe since you added 1 c flour and 1/2 c water, did you perhaps start with about 1/2 c starter? Also, since I stir the liquid into my starter, would this bit of extra hydration affect the handling of dough (and would the rest period in the refrigerator help with that) or texture/crumb of the baked loaf? Thanks a million in advance!

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