Sourdough 3 - part c

My attempt to revive my starter failed.....it bubbled a bit which seemed to be a reasonable amount after the first feeding after over a month in the fridge, but after the second feeding it did nothing at all. By yesterday afternoon it had developed a layer of hooch about half a centimeter from the top which looked rather sinister. I was thinking about what I'd done differently this time and came up with four factors. First and I suspect most importantly was that I used warm tap water instead of heating up bottled water, second, I heated it by 'eye' not by thermometer, thirdly, it's a lot hotter now than it was for Sourdough Two, and finally and I'm sure insignificantly, I kept the 'refreshed' starter in the kitchen rather than above my desk.

This morning, I've (hopefully) revived it again by doing the following:

• Discarding a good proportion of the inactive goo, including everything above and including the mysterious floating layer of hooch.
• Transferring half a cup of clean starter to a clean bowl.
• Giving it a damn good beating with a wire whisk.
• Heating one cup of bottled water to 40degrees.
• Adding water and one cup of organic white bread flour (I've run out of rye) to the bowl.
• Thoroughly mixing starter, water and flour until it looked lovely and smooth and smelled really quite nice.
• Poured into a clean plastic tub, level marked (thank you again Mr Postman), lid attached and placed on my lucky shelf above my desk.

Now I wait and in 12 hours do the following - without discarding any starter add two cups of water and two cups of flour (inconveniently twelve hours will be at around 23.00 tonight when I'll be in bed, so I may do it at about 9pm which is a more sociable time if I'm working in 12 hour shifts). This sounds like a lot of flour to me, I think I may have added too much this morning. I'll try and remember to start off smaller next time!