Need some clarification on amount of Starter
I have been baking bread and cinnamon rolls using a potato flake starter, This starter has been alive fore three generations, almost 100 years. It made me want to delve into the world of a flour based starter. I am mostly a lurker on the board, I do alot more reading than I do posting. I began my starter about a week ago. I was running around 100% hydration. Note: I do not have scales yet, getting them this week, so I am still using volume.
I had app 1 cup of starter. It was not doubling in size, I was feeding everyday. Yesterday I poured out half a cup of my starter, discarded the rest. I then mixex 1/2 cup flour and 1/4 cup of water. Oh boy did that make it go crazy! so i fed again today with the same amounts. The starter seems to be headed in the right direction, I am going to cotinu feeding for another week the same I have been doing. In reading so may posts about beginning a starter, I found one over riding piece of advice from jsut aobut everyone; BE PATIENT! That is what i have been doing. so thanks to everyone for that advice. Now I need some more.
I have see where people keep a small amount of starter. I am a little confused as to how this works. I have read alot of posts, but nothing is really clicking for me yet. I have recipes that call for 1 cup of starter. That is the exact amount of starter I have. How would I go about doing this? I guess I need this explained in dumb country boy terms! haha. I am country.
Thanks for the help again. Hopefully going to be making some bread next week. Gonna let the starter get well established. hopefully it is by this coming weekend, I am heading out of town and will have to put it in the fridge.
Paul
Hi Paul,
Welcome to the world of starters! Sounds like yours is doing well.
I do suggest you get a nice digital scale, it makes a big difference for baking accuracy. For example, your 1/2c flour + 1/4c water is closer to 100% hydration; 1:1 flour-water by volume is usually around 180%+ hydration.
I only keep a small amount of starter when I'm not baking (usually only about 1/3 cup). When I need to bake, 2-3 days before I "build" the starter to the quantity I need by feeding it more frequently and with larger quantities of food (flour+water).
Hi Paul,
If you need "a cup" of starter in your next bread recipe, what you could do is take a couple of tablespoons of your ripe and ready starter and put them in a small pint jar (mason jars are good, with the big mouth). Add your 1/4c water and 1/2c flour and mix. Set this aside to rise as usual. This is your "Mother" starter which will produce all the starter you'll use from here on. I suggest you never actually use this starter in a recipe, only the excess from a feed. Make sure to label the jar so no one accidentally tosses out the "smelly goo". And of course, give it a name.; this is your pet starter.
With your big cup of starter (minus that 2 tablespoons) you may need to feed again if it's been refrigerated for a while. It needs to get a feed or two before it's up to speed again and ready for bread. So again, take 2 tablespoons and put in a bigger (3 cups +) jar, add 1/4c water and 1/2c flour; put the remainder in another jar and into the fridge. This should give you about a1/2 cup starter. Let this rise until it's just about to fall back. Then feed this whole jar, without removing any, another 1/4c water and 1/2c flour. Now you'll have 1 cup (about); if it's short, add a bit more water and flour in the same 1:2 proportion to get up to 1 cup. Let this expand at room temp (70-75F) and be ready to use it in your dough when it's about peaked.
That third jar with about 3/4 cups of excess in the fridge you can use to make pancakes or muffins or any variety of baked goodies. If you aren't expecting to bake any time soon, however, it can go in the compost.
When you get your scales, you can get even more accurate with your measures and keep a quite small quantity of Mother, like 10:20:20 (50g), maybe even less (6:12:12 = 30g). And you'll want to switch to recipes that use weights, not "cups" of flour and starter.
Hope this helps.
Happy baking,
Paul
Yumarama & MellowBakers
P.S.: And yes, a digital scale is hugely handy in baking.
Thanks for the replies. That did clear it up for me. One more thing. The "mother" starter. What do you do when you need to make bread with that. When I feed it, the half cup I take out, I grow that until its enouigh for the recipe? I have my sweet bread starter and this is what I do with it. I remove one cup, that is for the recipe. The other cup is fed and after 12 hours it goes into the fridge.
I will answer my own question and you tell me if this is correct! i have my "mother" starter. When I need, lets say, 1 cup for the recipe. I will remove half a cup from mother. I will feed remaining cup in mother and put back in fridge. the other half cup will be used for recipe. I will have to feed the recipe starter until it reaches the desired amount for bread. I hope you an understand this.
Thanks again for all the help. Yes, by this weekend i will have a digital scale!
Paul
That's pretty much it!
If you are making the same recipe over and over, as in you have your standard "go to" bread, you can keep the Mother at a size that makes sense for that specific quantity. Keep in mind you do need to give that Mother starter a feed or two ahead of time, if it lives in the fridge, before it gets used in bread as it's not really ready to go straight out of the cool fridge. Keeping a smaller quantity will mean less excess for those first couple of refresher feeds. Heck even if it lives on the counter and gets fed daily, you can keep it much smaller. Less excess to worry about, and it's crazy easy to make a large quantity from almost nothing in just a couple of feeds.
So if you were to keep doing this recipe and it required a cup of starter (hopefully you'll soon switch to a recipe that specifies grams, not volume) you can keep just a quarter cup as the Mother starter. Or thereabouts.
And now for some possibly confuzzing number crunching... Skip if math makes your head spin.
If the above is all Greek to you, don't worry, it will fall into place when you're more familiar with sourdough breads. Right now, you will be more focussed on getting a good recipe and repeating it for a fair while until you have near perfect loaves from it. But that too is another process, and it can be discussed later.
Anyway, back to the main point...
Ignoring precise quantities, you might process it like this:
Thursday night: You're wanting to bake your bread Saturday, so you take your Mother out of the fridge and feed, cutting the starter back to a tablespoon and putting the excess in your "Pancake" jar in the fridge. You then feed that tablespoon old starter with 2 tablespoons water (stir) and add three good tablespoons of flour. You now have about 1/4 cups of Mother again.
Friday morning before work, you feed your Mother again, same amounts, putting the excess in the "Pancake" jar again.
Friday night, you feed the Mother once more, same small amounts, but put the excess in your Recipe Starter jar/bowl this time. This you then build up to the amount you need tomorrow: one cup before any expansion. Your Recipe Starter stays out overnight to be used in the morning. Your Mother stays out on the counter just a few hours until it's active but not peaked. You don't want it fully risen as it will still need food while in the fridge for the next week; it's cold and very slow, not inactive.
Saturday morning, your Recipe Starter is ready to be mixed in your favourite bread recipe, you've built it up to it's required 1 cup amount, even if it has expanded to two or three cups now. While the dough is bulk proofing, you could make pancakes (or muffins or what have you) with your collected excess and have a tasty breakfast.
Keep in mind, this is just ONE way of handling your starter, there are others that work too. Keeping a stiff starter, for example, would use a different approach. Keeping the starter out all the time, useful if you bake several times a week, would need a different plan again. There's no "one way" and none are necessarily better than the other. You'll develop your own schedule and approach over time and as you learn other handling techniques.
But starting out, this is not a bad way to go.
Happy baking,
Paul
Yumarama & MellowBakers
If you want a good and well tested recipe that uses grams, you could be quite happy with Wild Yeast Blog's "Norwich Sourdough" which you can find here. Plenty of people on this site have made it previously so there's lots of discussion about it you can search and read through to get the kinks out. And of course, if a search doesn't prove helpful, you can always post a new topic and seek answers from the very helpful baker friends you have here.
It is often suggested that new bakers try to perfect ONE recipe before hopping to others so that they learn the ins and out of what one little change here and another little change there will do. And you would want to change just one thing each time; if you changed three or four, you won't really know which one resulted in what improvement/problem.
Conversely, hopping to a new recipe each time in search of a "better" one will give you no constant to measure your improvements on.
And consider getting yourself a notebook to keep notes of your process. This too will help you see what you've adjusted and what it did to the final bread. Armed with this plus a scale for accurate duplication of each recipe (pretty much) and lots of previous attempts and discussions to read and learn from (no need to make every mistake yourself, after all!) AND helpful people to ask most anything right here and on numerous blogs and sites, you're pretty much guaranteed to improve quickly and become an official Bread Head.
Soon, you'll be building your library of bread books, scribbling notes (maybe in pencil, maybe -gasp!- pen) in your books, and your significant other will wonder if you've gone a little batty. Hopefully, the bread you produce will temper that opinion a bit.
Welcome to our world.