Hi Charisma, it sounds like your feedings are not consistent in terms of the ratio of starter as compared to water/flour you're feeding, and this can have a big impact on how your starter performs. Especially when you have a large container of starter and are only offering the starter a relatively small feeding, the starter will tend to be inadequately nourished and dominated by sourdough waste. It also sounds like you live in a fairly warm climate, which will cause your starter to ripen faster (which you have observed). All these factors may be playing into a starter that isn't likely to perform consistently in your baking. 

I would check out our recommended feeding routine, and see how this works for you. In your warm climate, you'll likely have to reduce the percentage of starter as compared to water/flour fed, and use cool water for your feedings. Don't worry, offering your starter a relatively larger meal in this way won't harm it; it will just slow down the ripening process, which can help you get your twice a day feedings to line up closer to the peak. For example, you might want to try feeding your starter with a 1:3:3 ratio of starter:water:flour (by weight). With our feeding routine this would look like 38g starter + 113g water + 113g flour. 

It sounds like you also have several pots of starter going and are unsure how to maintain them all successfully. I would try to focus on one "mother" starter that you maintain in a consistent way, and then build the quantity of starter you have available during the last feeding before you plan to bake. If you have a scale you can be quite precise about how you build your starter, factoring exactly how much starter you need, plus enough leftover to feed and maintain. You may have to move your starter to a larger container for this "build," but you can still maintain your starter with the same ratio of ingredients. Say you want to make our recipe for Naturally Leavened Sourdough Bread, which requires 454g of ripe starter (more than our normal maintenance amount produces). This means that you need to generate 454g for the recipe, plus enough leftover to feed and maintain. If you adopted the 1:3:3 ratio feeding routine I recommended above, this means you'll need 38g of starter in addition to the 454g for the recipe. Since it's hard to scrape off every gram of starter from the side of your container, it won't hurt to round that number up a bit: 454 + 38 = 492 (we'll round up to 504g). Now, when you feed with a 1:3:3 ratio you basically have 7 portions by weight, so, if you divide 504 by 7 you get 72. That means that your last feeding before you plan to bake would look like: 72g starter + 216g water + 216g flour. I know, the math can seem daunting at first, but once you get into a regular routine it should all fall into place. 

Our sourdough feeding routine does generate a lot of discard, so you may want to have another container in your refrigerator designated for discard, which you can use in these recipes. And if you decide you prefer to maintain a smaller starter, and then build the quantity over the course of a few days in preparation for baking, this blog post can help you get there. You can still do the 1:3:3 ratio with a smaller starter, but it might look like this: 10g starter + 30g water + 30g flour. 

Finally, the quantity of starter in a recipe impacts both the rate of fermentation and to a certain degree the flavor/rise of the bread, but the most important thing to focus on at this point is maintaining your starter so that it is healthy, ripe and ready to go when you add it to your bread recipe. A small quantity of robust starter is going to work better than a large quantity of sluggish, inactive starter, so making sure that your starter is up to the job will go a long way to improving your results, no matter what recipe you make. 

Barb

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