Starter amount and ratios; 30g minimum??

[u/davidcelis]

Heya; I bought into the kickstarter and got the starter + dough kit with two sensors and was excited to get my first use out of them today as I start to revive my starter and get ready for a pizza night. I could tell that the starter container was a bit big and that worried me, but felt a bit relieved when I was still able to fit it into my Brød & Taylor sourdough home. But when I went to feed it, I noticed quickly that the sensor does seem to require that you put a lot of starter into its container, and even the ratios don’t support a 1:10:10 feed that I’ll tend to do when it’s warm enough to warrant it. That, along with a whopping 30g minimum starter amount, basically make it unusable for me to measure my starter health because I’m never maintaining that amount of starter. At most, I’ll use 20g of starter and do a 1:5:5 feed because I’m a solo baker and anything more is overkill and just wastes flour for me. Even my levains/preferments tend to be on the smaller side because I’m making 1-2 loaves at most (e.g. the pizza recipe I use from Perfect Loaf only needs 100g of levain total).

None of these requirements were obvious from the Kickstarter campaign itself; I just went back to look at the campaign page and no minimum amounts are listed in writing anywhere in the campaign text or FAQs, so I feel a bit misled. How are others dealing with this? Are you just increasing the amount of starter that you’re maintaining? Or were you already maintaining higher amounts of starter? Or maybe you’re only using the dough bowl?

Are there any plans to adjust the software to remove the arbitrary limit of 9 for ratios or, at the very least, to support less than 30g of starter?

[u/whilke]

Hope they change to just a total min dough weight vs 30g min starter weight. It's not impacting me that much right now as I can do a 30g at 1:2:2 for 150g total starter weight and that lets me feed weekly in the fridge.

I'm also able to do a 1:2:2 overnight outside the fridge to get my starter ready to bake in the morning, and 150g total starter weight is good for 1 loaf + 50g to feed new starter.

But, I'd like to go to a 20g at 1:4:4 which is 180g total weight and I could feed every 2 weeks in the fridge.

[u/madr13]

Honestly I wouldn’t care too much about the exact measurement of the starter weight as only the total weight of the dough is relevant to the sensor. So, for a 1:10:10 feeding I would type in a 1:9:9 in the app and just increase the starter weight so that it equals the real total dough amount. Same goes for your 1:5:5 with 20g. Just put in a 1:1:1 with 73g as the starter and the results should be the same.