On 11/14/2017 at 6:33 AM, Chris Hennes said:
"Expert" is almost certainly too strong a word here! But in a word, no. I had a liquid layer very early on (days 2-4, maybe?) but now it's just a relatively uniform bubbly mass. And I took the hands-off approach when I started it, I literally just mixed it up and let it sit for 48 hours untouched. Now I'm feeding it at 40g/80g/80g. I find the book's discussion of this quite confusing, since they really give two completely different feeding schemes and I can't tell if that's intentional or not. There's the "discard 75% and replace it with equal parts flour and water" line (which works out to 67%/100%/100%), and there's the bakers percentage table which is 25%/100%/100%. The chapter says the starter isn't that sensitive to this, and that does seem to be the case so far, but I don't understand the huge variation here.
Yes. Or at least, that's what I do. When it's feeding time on Fridays I don't discard the 75% portion, I just split it off and feed it as well (or as much of it as I need to create the levain for Saturday's baking).
What a fantastic thread! I've been struggling with the basic levain recipe described in Modernist Bread on page 3-54. I also noticed the same discrepancies with the suggested feeding schemes described in the HOW TO Start a Liquid Levain section (pg 3-54) and Best Bets for Levains - liquid levain (pg 3-55). I thought maybe I was not reading the former section correctly, and so I tweeted Francisco Migoya asking about it, but he didn't reply :(. But thanks to your post, I know I wasn't the only person confused by it. 
Anyway, so I failed at building a levain...again! Here was my schedule based on how I interpreted the steps in the "HOW TO start a Liquid Levain" section. I remove 75% of the culture, and add equal amounts of flour and water to replace what I discarded.
Temperature: 68-70 F
Storage vessel: glass jar with an air tight lid.
Friday, 10:00 PM: Start levain: 150g/150g (flour/water)
Saturday, 10:00 PM: Do nothing
Sunday, 10:00 PM: 75g/112.5g/112.5g (culture/flour/water) --> I see bubbles. It appears lively.
Monday, 10:00 PM: 75g/112.5g/112.5g (culture/flour/water) --> I see bubbles. It appears lively. It had doubled in size at some point in the past 24 hrs. The levain is light and airy as I pour it out of its container.
Tuesday, 10:00 PM: It looks completely inactive. There's a layer of hooch on top, and very few bubbles. When I pour it out, the levain is loose and wet. There's really very little if any discernible air in the levain.
*I gave up after that. I'd tried on a previous attempt and kept with it for 7 days, but the levain never seemed to become lively/bubbly and was not rising in size. That's why I gave up so early on with this attempt. Should I have kept going? Unfortunately, I did not take a photo of it, but it looked very similar to Anna's photo
This is my first post here. Hopefully I'll be able to contribute to this wonderful community!
Thanks!
* Actually I didn't "give up". I said "screw it" and I switched over to the recipe 25% levain/100% flour/100% water on pg 3-55. We'll see how it goes. But I really wanted to see it work with their original steps in the "HOW TO Start a Liquid Levain" section.
