Regarding starter volumes - how low can I go?
I must say I'm getting a lot of information on this forum!
To qualify - my starter is still in the developing phase. It has been about a month now, and it's still a struggle to make it double in volume. The problem: I am accumulating a lot of starter discards. I am quite hesitant in throwing anything away, and they do make good, albeit tart, pancakes.
My question: to minimize starter discards, what's a nice amount of starter that I can maintain, that will still allow my yeast/bacteria colony to develop? I'm not after nano quantities. If I'm told that I can do this with a total volume of starter in the range of 60 to 90 grams, I'd be happy with those figures. That would be easier to compute, too - with ratios of 20:20:20 or 30:30:30 per refreshment.
I think my next post will be on how to kickstart my starter's activity, but I will save that for later! I'll deal with the volumes first.
Thank you in advance!
or 10 20:30 :) When feeding for a recipe increase the water as needed. I think your starter is long overdue to test for making bread.
If you think you have more lacto than yeast activity, try maintaining an environmental temp of 80-82F, esp after a feeding. A few degrees makes a BIG difference in the yeast population.
When I'm starting a culture, I start with 1-2 tablespoons of AP flour. I never did measure my starts in grams but 60-90g of finished starter sounds about right.
As for discards, the smaller the better but if you have plenty just add it to any other baking as a flavorant.
OR
take a look at this book I found recently (confession-I've owned it for many years but never appreciated it until recently)
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/48719/never-toss-discarded-starter-again-book-recommendation
Enjoy some delicious baking!
A firmer starter will typically keep better in the fridge (or at room temperature), so you could, like Mini suggested, go for a 10:20:30 feed (or 15:30:45). Less starter (plus) more flour and water means that your yeasts and bacteria will have more food to eat and will be thus less likely to run out of food as quickly.
You would also do well to research dabrownman's "No Muss No Fuss" starter, which seems to be a darling of many here on the forum, for very good reason. Basically, it's a starter maintenance system with virtually no (if any) waste. But much depends also on your baking schedule and what kinds of breads you are making and what kinds of flours you are working with.
Thank you for all your help! I'll note everything down. Thank you for setting me along the right track!
May I include the rest of my starter issues?
Yes, MiniOven, I am indeed eager to start baking bread, specially after seeing pictures of all your glorious loaves! What held me back from trying to bake bread: my starter can only rise 70% from baseline. I keep on coming across the guidelines for adequate starter activity - i.e., it should increase in volume to double or triple in a few hours - and I am not yet reaching those levels. I don't mind a slightly dense bread, but is a 70% rise in my sourdough starter strong enough to leaven bread? Are there instances when the doubling guideline can be waived? I've been nurturing this starter for a month already.
I'll try to concentrate it up to those concentrations - 10% starter, 20% water, 30% flour (if I understood those ratios correctly). I have tried doing that this week, since my starter rises, and falls after 8 hours. I am trying to extend it up to 12 hours to enable me to feed it only twice a day. I haven't achieved this yet, since the starter starts to collapse way before the 12th hour. I have gone down to 5:30:30 (1:6:6 ?) - but the degree of rise was further diminished. Currently, I am back to higher proportion of starter and I have resumed working my way down again.
I don't know if this is part of the problem: I still use a bit of whole wheat flour whenever I feed, mixed with bread flour. Previous refreshments of pure bread flour or all-purpose flour resulted in less rise. Am I confusing the yeast residents too much? Should I buckle down and use plain unbleached all-purpose flour all the way and wait for things to stabilize?
... I'll find a *cooler* spot, Clazar! Our forecast for this week ranges from 73 - 91F in my part of the world. Temperatures hover around the high 80's to 90's for about 8 hours during the day. A simple set-up might work: an insulated container, with a jar of cold water plus a few ice cubes on the opposite corner, away from the starter.
The LAB's are indeed getting the upper hand. Sometimes my pancakes from the discards come out unpleasantly tart. Thank you for the book suggestion on what to do with pooled starter discards! It's going to make a nice change from all those pancakes.
The No Muss/No Fuss method sounds like a simple and frugal method, lepainSamidien! I saw the thread a few days ago, but the figures flew by over my head. I think I get it now. A post in that thread broke it down into a simple step-by-step method.
Thank you all for your tips! I think I'll see some improvement soon!
" I have tried doing that this week, since my starter rises, and falls after 8 hours. I am trying to extend it up to 12 hours to enable me to feed it only twice a day. I haven't achieved this yet, since the starter starts to collapse way before the 12th hour."
Sounds like it meets several criteria to raise a loaf. :) For starter health, it should collapse before feeding again. I'd say it's doing fine but a slight increase in flour wouldn't be a bad idea for the hotter times of the day. Thicken it up (use less water) during these times to stretch to the second feeding.
(Let the starter show signs of rising and tuck into the fridge for a week and give yourself a break.)
You can't expect it to rise more than 70% when it is 100 hydration and fed so little. Generally speaking, if you feed a starter 1,1,1 it can double its volume from original (but not always, AP flour and non gluten flours and high hydration starters don't rise much) feed it double the amount of flour to starter and get double, triple ---> triple or Quadruple etc. Exceptions to every rule.
Want to know what it can do? take 10 g and give it 70 to 80g water and 100g AP flour and a block of about 8 to 10 hours. Mark the starting level in your jar or measuring cup. Mark off the hours starting with about 4 hrs into the rise until it peaks, flattens out (the middle looks less domed and more like it has a dimple or level spot) Just before it falls. This should all happen before the 12 hours are up so be ready to use the starter for a recipe.
Famous and practical 1,2,3 Recipe: (lots of posts and threads on it)
180g peaked starter
360g water (hold back just a tiny bit if using AP only flour)
540g flour Half bread and half AP or a favorite mixture of whole wheat and AP or whatever. Whole and Bread flours soak up more water than AP flours and whole flours will speed up the fermentation a little bit. More so than just AP flour
8 to 11 g salt depending on your taste buds.
Work into a dough and let rise about 1/3. That means if you look at the kneaded dough and chopped it into 3 sections you want it to look like it has 4 sections. It will just start to puff up a little bit but still be a rather dense dough ball. Play with it or lightly knead or fold it. Pat with a little water or lightly oiled hands, Cover and tuck into the refrigerator for the night or about an 8 to 12 hr period (or longer.) Take out next day or later and warm up when you are ready to watch it again with up to a 6 hour block of time. Look up: Flo 1 2 3 and you should find more instructions if you need them.
During that block of time you can let it rise and do some folding and a final shaping. Anytime you want to see what the inside looks like, cut it open and look. Slap it back together again and decide to let it rise, or fold the dough or shape the dough. I tend to leave it on the counter top with an inverted bowl over it. When the dough looks like it is rising more out than up, give it another folding and shaping to add height and tighten the skin of the dough. This happens more rapidly as the dough ferments. When I find myself reshaping the dough with less than 40 min intervals, I do a final shape and place upside down into a banneton or right side up in a parchment lined basket. (bake with the parchment, use it to transfer to the oven, etc.) for a final rise before slashing and baking in a 220°C oven. For 45 min to an hour.
THANK you, Mini-Oven! All duly noted, saved, and filed in Google Docs!!!
First things first - I'll do the 10:80:100 trial soon, and see if this starter is ready to go, and then proceed with the next steps of the 1-2-3 bread. It sounds simple, and I like to keep things at that level for now! I'm at the bottom of the learning curve.
I'm searching for the 1-2-3 thread right now.
Thank you so much for all your help! I see the light at the end of the slow sourdough tunnel!
Thank you for all your help! I've followed your recommendations, and I've given more feedings during the past few days. Today marked the first day - after a month of nurturing this starter - that my starter finally doubled in volume after feeding!
I decided to make the Sourdough No-Knead recipe posted in the New York Times.
http://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1018028-sourdough-no-knead-bread
I think I have a few questions, but since it is no longer related to my original query - I think I'll have to post it up on a different thread. I'll do a search first if it has been discussed before.
Thank you all so much!
starter for weeks and weeks at a time in the fridge with no maintenance and no discards.
No Muss No Fuss StarterThank you for posting your method, DaBrownMan! "No fuss" sounds very welcome indeed. Like what MiniOven said, it might be time to take a break. I've been fussing over the starter for a month now.
Right now, the dough is in the refrigerator after a brief first rise at room temp yesterday. It might behave like my starter (that is, rise up and bubble and collapse within 8 hours) - so I shortened the first rise by a significant degree. This recipe is from the Sourdough No Knead Bread, from the New York Times. Instead of a first rise of 10 to 24 hours as listed in the recipe, I shortened the first rise to a mere 4 hours, and placed the dough in the fridge. The temperature of the dough reached up to 87 degrees F during the first hour.
I hope I see a bit of rise after shaping tomorrow. This is my first attempt at baking sourdough bread. The general plan is to start baking after 1 to 2 days of cold storage, then shape and let it rise at room temperature for the whole prescribed duration (2 hours, or probably more), then bake in a Dutch Oven.
I'll come back for a post-bake analysis if things are less than what is expected of a first loaf!
Still on starter maintenance...
I think I read about someone's protocol on maintaining the sourdough starter. I am not sure if I remembered it correctly, though.
The method is to feed the starter every morning, and tuck it in the fridge after a few hours. The starter spends the rest of the afternoon and the the whole night in the refrigerator. The next morning, the starter gets brought out at room temperature, and fed again, and then brought back to the ref, and so on.
I wonder what the advantages will be of following this system. If this is a viable method, it appeals to me since I only have to feed the starter once a day. Daytime temperatures reach up to mid 90 degrees Fahrenheit. Ny starter requires feeding after 8 to 12 hours, even if I use a smaller percentage of starter relative to flour. I also work at home, so putting it in the refrigerator after 4 hours or so is doable (or whenever the optimum time is, for putting a fed starter in cold storage).
I'm looking at different ways in which I can sort of scale down on tending to the starter. So far, I've been using it nearly twice a week to bake bread; any less than that, I probably will decide on putting it in the refrigerator for longer-term storage.
Thank you once again!
One way is to keep a stiff starter in the fridge and to use a small amount to build a levain before each bake.
Another is to use a 100% starter from the fridge and to replace the amount you use. In my case, I bake about twice a week, usually with 100-120 gm of starter per bake. So when I use 100, I mix 50 gm flour plus 50 gm water into what's left, leave it on the counter for a few hours, then refrigerate until my next bake. I keep ~150 gm of starter, so this represents a 1:1:1 feeding, and when I use 120 gm, it's 1:2:2.
But that's me. Find a maintenance scheme that works for you. If you wan't to do daily feedings, fine. But be aware you don't have to choose a scheme based on a pre-conception that feedings have to be a particular frequency.
I'm glad you shared that method.
I thought that if the starter spent three or more days in the refrigerator, it has to be taken out and fed for a couple of days before it gets strong enough for baking. If it can be used straight from the refrigerator (assuming one performs twice-a-week feedings, as in your case) - that makes it much easier, indeed.
I'll see if it my starter will behave in the same way. Thank you!
you do have to adjust the amount of starter you keep to fit how much you normally use. For instance, if you keep 500 gm and use 100 per bake, adding 50 gm water plus 50 gm flour to the unused 400 gm of starter would be a major under-feed.
That's why I keep ~150 gm. It means my feeding is 1:1:1 when I use 100 gm. And I make sure to give it a stronger 1:2:2 feeding at least once every few weeks by using 120 gm, either to make a slightly larger loaf or one with a somewhat higher proportion of starter. If the amount of starter you normally use is different, the amount you keep will differ but with the same ratio where the amount you keep is 1.5 x the amount you usually use.
And after you replenish your starter, refrigerate it before it peaks so that the yeast still has something to feed on in the fridge. I usually leave it on the counter for anywhere from 2-4 hours but I don't know if any time is actually necessary.
Thank you, Arjon! My starter is now consistently doubling within 12 hours, and I will be putting it in the fridge soon. I think it is strong enough for cold storage. The last time I did that was when the starter was still in the process of development, and it took some time before I was able to revive it. I hope I don't commit the same errors again.
From the fridge, do you thaw out the starter before you feed it? Or can I just dilute the cold starter with room temperature water, stir it up, and then add flour?
With a stronger starter, I hope my second attempt at baking sourdough bread will be much better. The first one was flat and dense, but it tasted fine. It will take a lot of time before I can start posting pictures on this forum!