Can I use a piece of dough as starter without feeding it first?
You can use that piece straight in, no separate feeding needed. A pinch of finished dough is essentially a starter, so it already carries the yeast and bacteria to ferment your next batch. Just mix it into the fresh flour, water and salt and let it go. If it had been sitting a long time, a feeding first will wake it up, but for a next-day bake it is not necessary.
Answered by Hendrik, The Bread Code
From the book
Simply take whatever starter you have left and feed it again. If you depleted all your starter you can cut a piece of your dough. The dough itself is nothing different than a gigantic starter. I recommend a 1:5:5 ratio like mentioned before. So take 1 piece of starter, feed with 5 parts of flour and 5 parts of water. If it is very hot where you live, or if you want to make the bread around 24 hours later after your last feeding, change the ratio. In that case I would go for a 1:10:10 ratio. Sometimes I don’t have enough starter. Then I even use a ratio of 1:50:50 or 1:100:100. Depending on how much new flour you feed it takes longer for your starter to be ready again.
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