April 23, 2016 - 12:37pm
Using WW starter to leaven white bread?
Reading through a lot of the posts, I noticed that many people maintain a WW starter and a white flour starter separately. Is this simply to be able to make 100% WW bread? Can you leaven a white loaf with the WW starter successfully? I am a complete newbie to SD baking, so I apologize if this question is silly.
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then you need your starter to be the same... so a 100% whole wheat starter for 100% WW bread, the same for white breads. For most it's a personal preference rather than some hard & fast rule though.
However... Some people start with whole wheat starters (or WW rye) to make "white" wheat breads - e.g. my usual white bread would need 150g of starter, so I could build that with 30g WW starter plus 60g white flour and 60g water, let that "ripen" for a few hours, then add that to 500g of flour (plus wate & salt) - the overall percentage of WW flour in the total flour is then very low (about 3%) and that's fine for some folks.
The converse would be the same for making WW bread from a white flour starter - so little white in the WW it might make little difference.
I maintain 3 starters - white wheat, white spelt and (light) rye. I don't make 100% WW sourdoughs but I do make 100% white sourdoughs and 100% spelt and rye sourdoughs. I sometimes use starters directly from the jar too - e.g. if I was making a "sunday special" I'd simply take that 150g directly from the jar (which holds about 550g) without doing an intermediate build.
-Gordon
and figured that the different starters were to maintain 100% WW or white breads. I started a WW starter for my first one and plan on baking my first loaves as you illustrated in your example, WW starter with a mixture of other flours. Thanks for verifying and explaining :)
A WW starter, a rye one and a white BF or AP one will also give you different degrees of sourness, assuming all else is the same.
and make everything from a bit of that:-) No worries - anything goes when it comes to bread. Having one starter is a blessing though...especially on that has no waste, is small and never needs to be maintained for 24 weeks!
No Muss No Fuss StarterI just keep one starter made with whole rye and use that to build whatever I want for the bread I'm baking. I don't bake enough to justify keeping more than one culture going.
You can always add an extra build stage to the levain if you want less of the original wholegrain starter in your dough ;-)