What is your tank temp?
mmm....this doesn't really make sense to me. To me, a clean tank is one which the rocks harbor a healthy bacteria population sizeable enough to control NH3, NO2, and NO3 all on their own! When you say "an allow nitrates to be controlled by me" instead of letting the bacteria do it, are you talking water changes? or dosing NO3? FWIW, i believe it's best to have a healthy population of de-nitrifying bacteria (the kind that "eats" NO3) so well as to keep up with all your feeding (and bioload) and then you dose NO3 to maintain nitrates at the levels you wish for your coral coloration etc... but thats just me.
What you'll find in the cycle is that the nitrifying bacteria (the kind that takes NH3 and makes NO2) grows strong first, and then you get the NO2 devouring bacteria population and then the denitrifying NO3 eaters. So you'll start your tank having excess NO3 and then as the tank matures, you'll struggle to keep NO3 high enough for your desires (so you dose it). Ultimately this--to me at least--describes as "clean of a tank as possible": One which behaves like a natural, stable, ecosystem without accumulations of deadly bi-products from biological processes of your tanks inhabitants.
Again, a "pinch" is not a standardized measurement and pellets could be any type of food and the same food's ingredients changes without knowledge of the buyers. This is why it is important to dose something like pure ammonia: to make it scientific so people can actually tell what the heck is going on in their tank. With food, doesn't matter what food you use or how much or how often, at best, you're guessing that the food has been "devoured" by the bacteria. The presence of NH3 still in your tank, with out the addition of food etc.., just tells me that there is some source of NH3 in your tank. It doesn't tell me how strong your bacteria population is. NOW, if you instead said, "I set up my tank, dosed Tim's (or similar) pure NH3 in my tank until it reached 2ppm NH3. I then waited 24 hours and tested NH3 again and saw i am now down to 1.5ppm. 24 hours again 1.0ppm. Re-dosed NH3 up to 2ppm. Waited 24 hours and found i was back at 1.0ppm" that would tell me your population is growing and getting stronger and I'd tell you to "keep going with the NH3 dosing/testing process until your tank digested ~2.0ppm in 24 hours". Then you'd move on to testing NO2 to check out that population growth's progress.
Here is an example of the nitrogen cycle process of cycling my 230gallon tank...and even at the end of this cart, my tank wasn't really considered "mature"....it was just able to digest relatively quickly 2ppm of NH3 -> NO2 -> NO3 -> N2 gas + other species made with the O2
YELLOW is ammonia
ORANGE is NO2
RED is NO3
You can see here the spikes in yellow are where i dosed Dr. Tim's NH3 to only 1ppm and then kept measuring until it all went away. you can see how ammonia hits zero first, then NO2, then NO3. If I continued this process, and plotting it, with dosing etc.. you'd eventually see that same 0, 0, 0 order, but it'd occur much more rapidly (unlike what you see above where it is taking weeks longer to process the NO3 as compared to NH3 and NO2.
Hopefully that makes sense.
In all honesty, if your tank could some how promise to hold at 0.5ppm NH3 with a large bioload and regular feedings, that's not terrible....but because we have no idea how much NH3 is being generated, or more importantly digested, over time in your tank right now, no one can really say for certain if you tank has a decent population of nitrifying/denitrifying bacteria. This is one of the major benefits of going with Dr. Tims (or similar) pure ammonia. You can actually gauge how strong your bacterial population is.
Until then, and without you telling us your tank's temperature.....no one can really tell you much of anything with any certainty other than.... your tank is likely started its cycle....but thats about it. (temperature by the way is a strong factor in bacterial population growth..... if your tank is too cold, it will take the population longer to grow...it will grow....it will just take much longer and it won't be as robust to changes in NH3 input levels. If your tank is too hot, you're killing your bacteria....)
