Hi, Al.

You can convert a rye sour to a wheat starter with one feeding. If you want a more "pure" wheat bread, feed it with wheat flour twice.

Figure: If you are making a 100% hydration starter (half flour, half water by weight) from a rye sour and do a 1:2:2 (starter:water:flour) feeding, after one feeding, 1/6 of the flour in the fed starter would be rye (assuming your rye sour is also half flour, half water). If you are using a large amount of starter in your bread, for example 33% of the total flour in the dough is from the starter, the dough would have 1/6 x 1/3 = 1/18 = 5.5% rye flour.

This proportion of rye is enough to add flavor complexity, which is good, but not enough for you to taste the rye as rye.

Two feedings with wheat flour would result in negligible rye in the final dough.

See?

David

I see, thanks. So it`s pretty easy to change the kind of flour for feeding a starter without the bacteria minding the change of food (once the starter is nice and active)? 

One final, slightly daft question (sorry)... is it critical that the white flour is unbleached? I`m going to use a good quality flour, but living in Japan, it`s tricky to read the information on the packet stating whether it`s been bleached or not! After getting the starter up and running nicely, I`d hate to kill it!

Thanks,

Al. 

Thanks Dragonbones,

I`ll give that a go. The choice of flours here is more limited, but hopefully they`ll have some unbleached. At least it`ll be good practice for my ropey Japanese :-)

Al

Thanks Dragonbones,

I`ll give that a go. The choice of flours here is more limited, but hopefully they`ll have some unbleached. At least it`ll be good practice for my ropey Japanese :-)

Al

Unless I'm being a purist, I really don't worry about it. The amount of starter compared to the rest of the flour is really so small that most people won't notice. At best, it will offer an interesting undertone. A rye starter is also generally more active, and if this is a new, baby starter, may be beneficial.

When I want to change my starter for a recipe I start a couple of days before hand. I feed it as usual and then divide it into two containers. I keep slightly more than half "pure" and put that in the refrigerator and roughly 1/4th of what I'll need for a total starter weight and put it in another container. The smaller portion gets fed twice a day until I have the amount of almost-pure whatever (be it wheat, white, rye, or spelt) that I am needing to cook with.

I was going to post this question this morning?

For making a rye sourdough in the style of Hamelman or Leader, will I get the same result whether I innoculate my rye starter with a white starter or I start the rye starter from scratch using only rye flour?