Question about Multiple Starters
Hello everyone!
Just having some thoughts today, what are the benefits of using multiple sourdough starters - in the same dough? I've heard of people doing this but never tried it myself.
I keep my very happy, healthy starter well fed on All Purpose flour, and he always gives me a decent amount of success with my bread.
Starting to get a bit experimental, and at least would like to. I know hamelman uses some recipes where he uses mixed starters. Just wondering the reason for this - and the science behind it.
Im sure it would lead to flavour variations - but why different than just tweaking the flour type in the dough or percentages?
How should you change the amount of starter you put in a recipe? For example if I'm doing a build of 28g white starter, 161 water 150 AP flour, how should I change my amounts if I want to use a rye starter as well as my AP starter?
Sorry if I'm not articulating well.
Thanks :)
Nick
I have been useing my own starter and the O.T. 1864 starter together for years. I just use equal amounts of each and get very good results.
deciphering the abbreviations folks use here based on context, but this one lost me...
What is O.T. ?
I assumed it meant Oregon Trail...
So let us say for example you are making a bread that has a fairly high percentage of rye flour in it, we'll call it 50 percent rye 50 percent ap to keep it simple. If you use your normal AP flour starter and are prefermenting 25 percent of the flour in the formula you going to be adding 25 percent ap flour and 50 percent rye to your final dough along with the 25 percent ap flour that has already been fermented. Now if you change that to a whole rye starter and run it the same way your final dough will have 50 percent ap, 25percent rye flour and then the 25 percent rye flour that has already been fermented. Obviously rye flour does not develop a gluten structure like ap, by fermenting the ap flour first you've already wore down the gluten structure in the fermented section of ap. So the loaf you make using the AP starter will come out flatter and probably dense because it won't have as much structure to trap gasses as the loaf that you used a rye starter in. So beyond flavor there are structural reasons to play around with different types of starters...
We did this experiment with Hamelman in class where we made the same overall formula 3 times with different starters going in to them. Followed it through to bake and observed the differences in flavor as well as the differences in final loaf measurements.
Thanks! This is an awesome answer.
I ended up making hamelmans sourdough with whole wheat and prefermented all of the whole wheat flour - turned out great, flavour and structure, and beautiful considering how wet i made the dough.
by putting it all in the levain build is a great way to improve bread taste, structure and softness of the crumb with whole grains. If you reduce the levain amount by sifting out the bran in the whole grains and using that to feed the levain and then retard the built whole bran levain for 24-48 hours the bread will be more sour and the crumb structure even moire open and soft.
in bread. Mixing them also create a different bread flavor wise as well. Some are sweet and some are sour and a mix of those would be somewhere in between. This week I'm mixing 4 starters in one loaf of sandwich bread - 2 rye and 2 potato starters just to see how the bread tastes.