It's a good question, Marie. To keep your starter healthy and to ensure it has enough food, you want to feed 1 part starter with 1 part water and 1 part flour, all equal by weight. If you choose not to discard, you'll need to feed it with increasingly more and more water and flour to match the weight of the starter until you wind up with a swimming pool of sourdough. If you think of a sourdough culture as a little city, and all of the bacteria are people, each person needs to have enough food and water to live. Feeding starter with too small an amount of food/water, say, if you were to not discard and only feed it with 1/4 cup or so of water and flour, only a small amount of the bacteria would have enough food to stay alive. The sourdough culture wouldn't die, but it wouldn't have sour flavor and it would have trouble rising. We hope this helps! Annabelle@KAF

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