Catharsis

  Still got impatient I think, so could have let it rise longer. The starter seemed more lively early in the process.  Overnight slow rise in the fridge. 420F baking, with steam in the oven. Flavour is good sourdough. Lots of bubbles.

  Proofing the sourdough went OK. I followed The Pantry Mama 's instructions, except used a mishmash of whole grain flour, instead of high octane white flour. And I baked it at a reduced temperature from Mama's suggestion of 450F, and used a loaf pan instead of Dutch oven. It has a nice texture and taste, but I'd be happier if it was less dense. Things to try next time: 1) let it rise longer before baking. I went for 2 hours. It showed no signs of collapsing. 2) 450 F instead of 400F, or maybe longer than the ~22 minutes it was in the oven.  Mama thinks sourdough starter should at least double, and ideally triple in volume when it's fed. Mine is nowhere near that responsive. Keep maturing it, I guess.

 I'm dissatisfied with the liveliness of my sourdough starter. I think the temperature is too low. So I made a container with a heat source, and put the starter in there: Including enough smarts to run a control loop and keep the temperature optimal. Writing code for a PID loop wasn't too hard. Lots of good examples, including XXX's work. Here's the response to a change in target temperature while I was tuning the parameters: chatGPT had some advice on adding fuzzy logic control to account for non-linearities. I haven't implemented that yet.