You see this question pop up all the time in sourdough discussions:
“Why do I have to discard? I hate the idea of throwing anything away. Can’t I just keep feeding the starter?”
Although reducing the waste we produce as a species is a good thing, there are times when it’s actually more logical to NOT do [...]

On bread discussion boards where people talk about their sourdough starters, invariably you will see posts written by people who are concerned about the amount of flour or old starter they end up tossing away, especially during the creating-the-starter phase. There seems to be much fretting and worrying that so much product is simply going [...]

Considering that sourdough has been around for thousands and thousands of years, long before the introduction of grams, temperatures gauges, refrigerators, electric ovens, or even the idea that the world wasn’t flat, one would think starting your own starter is a breeze.
Maybe it is, but I had a heck of a time myself. And when [...]

As you feed your starter, you’ll probably realize that there’s stuff you can do with it but need a bit of help figuring what. In this entry I’ll touch (and link) on a few potential ideas.
Now for anyone who’s in the process of building a starter from scratch, the portions you discard are not actually [...]

There are several ways to keep a starter:

a “wet” starter which is like a thin pancake batter
a thicker pancake batter type
a stiff starter that looks like a ball of dough

There are advantages to each but for our purposes, we’ll use the more common ‘thick pancake batter’ type. We’ll also be keeping it at what’s referred [...]