Sometimes two + two = five, and you roll with it.
Reading a thread earlier today got me looking at the book "Bread Builders", including a section about about L. sanfranciscensis and dental plaque. Very weird. This got me thinking about some travel show I saw (Bourdain? Zimmern?) I saw a while back, where the host drank chicha somewhere in South America.
Sure, starters get going in all kinds of ways: wholegrain flours, whole fruit, pineapple juice. Now I've been reading with interest about fruit waters lately.
This got me thinking: what would the outcome be of a chicha-inspired starter?
So goes my experiment:
- 25g whole wheat flour
- 25g rye flour
- 25g spring water
Mix all ingredients until it's a firm dough (50% hydration seemed right).
Tear off small quail egg sized pieces of starter. Chew each piece for 30-60 seconds...yep. Really was not unpleasant, kinda gummy, but becoming slightly sweeter as I chewed. Place each chewed piece in a small container.
I let it rest for 2 hours, then added 25g more water and mix to make a 100% starter. Seems to me that 100% hydration starters are more conducive to certain bacterial growth, so this should be interesting.
Gross? Yes. Interesting? Absolutely.
Day 1: It's been probably 12 hours or so. Not much activity yet. I wonder how different this will be from my usual starter, which was built about 2 years ago using the Silverton organic grape method.
Will the chewing have an effect? As a control, I'm going to do one using the same feeding, the same schedule, but without the chewing. We'll see what happens.
