Let's say you have 200 grams of starter.

If you follow the traditional home method for feeding it, you'd use or discard 100 grams of starter, then add 50 grams of flour and 50 grams of water to the rest, getting it back to 200 grams. You then set it aside until next time. (Whether or not you refrigerate it is a separate issue.)

But consider a different scenario:

You have 200 grams of starter. You add 100 grams of flour and 100 grams of water, getting to 400 grams. 12 hours later you remove 200 grams of recently-fed and now quite active starter and use it to make bread.

You still have 200 grams of starter left, which was fed with a 1-1 ratio of water and flour. The difference is a matter of timing.

So figure out how much starter you need to make a batch of bread, and consider that your 'carryover' amount, each time you feed it you double that, then use half of it for making bread, getting back to the carryover amount.

I guarantee you that professional bakers are more likely to do it this way than to throw away half of their starter at each feeding.

An article came up on my phone the other day with a headline about people are using too many probiotics and why that's a problem. I didn't read it, but I have read other articles suggesting this trend might be overdone.

But by the time the scientists can conduct and publish multi-year time studies on the impact of a heavily probiotic diet (assuming they can get funding for one), the foodies will likely have moved on to something else.

King Arthur has some recipes that use a small amount of starter in the levain. I do think that their starter tends to be thicker--perhaps much more so--than my milk-based starter. I usually use a bit more when I bake those recipes, and I try to make sure that the starter has recently been fed.

I think that King Arthur had a blog post on keeping only a small amount of starter.

Aaron--maybe you need to send Sam a care package of crackers!