Can we keep a smaller pasta madre? For a healthy PM, we need to do daily maintenance. I usually feed it 1:1 PM:flour ratio but 100g a day, in a month, I use at least 3kg of flour, thrown away. This is assuming I only feed my PM once a day! Yes, I can easily tie it and let it sleep in the fridge, but it takes a long time to get the PM robust again so it's actually back to square one.
Anyway, I decided to experiment with feeding less. Here, I only use 50g PM, fed with 50g flour and 20-21g water. A day before production, I'll start increasing the size of the PM with each feed. I have done this method for about 2 weeks, and I don't notice anything different in performance. However, due to the mini size of the PM, I have to hand knead it. For me, I think a better size is about 160-170g. Not too small... which means using about 70g PM as seed. But it gets more tiring as PM gets bigger.
Current maintenance (for non production) for my PM is 1:1:0.4, 16C for 23-24 hours. I change the maintenance from time to time to find one that works best for me. I also do at least a warm feed once a week.
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Music: Bread by Lukrembo
