[HuggaBuggaMommy]

It is hard to throw out the starter, and for a while I tried not to, to keep splitting and culturing, and believe me, I was totally overrun in a few days and it took me *literally* two hours to feed it all. I read on sourdoughhome that if you don't toss the starter, in 10 days you'll have a swimming pool's worth. It's not too far from the truth. In the end, I just had to do it because I had waaaaaay too much starter.

Once it's established, if you're baking with it once a week, you won't really be discarding very much. What I do is, each week, I split the starter in half, feed the the refrigerator jar (again, if the starter is healthy, you only need one or two feeds before popping it back in to the cold; then you're only discarding at most once) until it doubles and put it back into the fridge. Then I feed the starter I removed and use that portion for baking.

The hungry smell is a very strong alcohol/acetone smell. You'll know it. It's easy to fix - just feed more often. Like I said, I do find that whole grains, especially freshly ground, need to be fed at least two and sometimes three times a day to keep the yeast/food/bacteria balanced.

The more sour the smell, the more lactobacilli bacteria there are in the starter. I don't really like that tang in my bread, so again, in my "baking" portion, all I do is feed more (usually a 3:1 or 4:1 flour/water to starter ratio) so the yeast overtake the bacteria and the taste mellows.