The Fresh Loaf

A Community of Amateur Bakers and Artisan Bread Enthusiasts.

Starter Ratios - Which to Use and When?

philm63's picture
philm63

Starter Ratios - Which to Use and When?

First post (other than the intro, of course...) and appropriately I'll start with, well, starters!

Me? I grew up in the Bay Area and was basically raised on San Francisco sourdough bread - love the stuff - very firm sourness most times. Mom always had a starter in the fridge. I never knew what that was all about until now. 

Recently I started reading up and decided to get a starter going. It took a few weeks but now I have one and it is going strong. It began its life the first week of July and I've made a few loaves from it already. Now it's time to step my game up.

Quick note about me; I am an electrical engineer (also a homebrewer so fermentation is very interesting to me) and I like things highly technical so don't pull any punches.

So, when making my levain for an upcoming loaf (or two), I'd normally take the 1L Cambro of culture (mother) out of the fridge and let it come to room temperature, draw a small amount into another 1L Cambro (these containers are great! Cheap, too!), feed with a 1:1:1, wait a day, repeat, and commence with the making of the bread. Don't worry; I weight everything!

My question is this; what if I went to a 1:2:2 or even higher ratio for my levain? What are the advantages of these different ratios/hydration levels? Assuming all King Arthur AP flour (yes, I know; time to start playing with different flours - WW, Rye, etc. Ah the learning curve...), how would different ratios affect the final product?

I'm looking at getting a handle on acid production here - I like a firm bite in sourdough and I'd like to be able to achieve this in my bread. 

 

dabrownman's picture
dabrownman

depends on how much time I have to get the loaf done, the temperature and how long it will be retarded.  Generally speaking the longer the process the better tasting the bread so using as little prefermented flour as possible will give you the best tasting bread.  The higher the temperature the faster things happen, the longer the retard the less the preferment required.  The more time you have to make the loaf on the counter the less the preferment.  The best of all worlds is- Lots of time, low temperature in the kitchen so you can really let a small levain work on the dough a long time and a very long retard is the cats meow when it comes to SD bread

Welcome and happy baking 

philm63's picture
philm63

I started by asking about levain ratios and ended with getting a handle on acid production - two different topics altogether. I even tossed in a little hydration without qualifying it. Silly me!

I see your advice, dabrownman, and certainly appreciate the insight - very helpful and it supports what I’ve been reading - but please allow me to reframe the question.

Speaking in terms of just the levain itself, not how much I put in the dough; when building the levain, keeping the feed ratio at 1:1:1 would give the highest ratio of active culture to incoming food for a given levain size (I’m speculating here - please correct me if I’m wrong). Increasing the ratio to 1:2:2 or higher serves to increase the total amount of levain, but also, it seems to me, results in a lower ratio of active culture to incoming food.

From brewing beer, I know that the ratio of active yeast cells (your package of fresh yeast) and the incoming food supply (your wort) is important for promoting either high growth rates (for making a starter i.e. propagating the colony - small ratio - growth rate is high or at least maximized due to limited food supply) or fermenting a batch of wort to make beer (much larger ratio - growth rate is not as high because the food supply is so large, the yeast get exhausted and take a nap (or flocculate) and drop out of solution).

Does the same apply for the levain? If you use a 1:1:1 feeding schedule you will have a specific growth rate, all else being equal. With an increased ratio of 1:2:2, will the growth rate change? Is this important to know/control? Are there any advantages to be had by increasing this ratio i.e. what might be the products of increased growth rates?

I’ve got lots more where this came from, but I’ll start another thread (or 20) to keep the topics specific.

dabrownman's picture
dabrownman

goal if bread making.  In beer making you want to convert all the starch in the grain to sugar and then convert that to alcohol and CO2 leaving a completely spent grain in the process.  At least that is my goal in beer making so raising the temperature to 140  F and then on to 150 F and higher to really get the amylase a and b enzymes to convert the starch to sugar and then getting a ;ot of yeast in the  mix to convert the sugar to alcohol and CO2 quickly and completely.

In bread making we only want to convert a small amount of starch to sugar, why room temperature is used,  and only need enough yeast and LAB to slowly create enough CO2 to raise the loaf and create enough acid for flavor and keeping qualities over a few ours rather than a few days.

How much starter you use depends on how much you keep and how you keep it.  If you have a liquid  starter in the counter that is 200 g, fed daily and or you bake often, then you might use 150 g of it for the levain for a loaf of bread.  IF you only keep a small amount of stiff starter in the fridge for weeks at a time with no maintenqnce, then you want to use maybe 10 g of it to build a levain to the 150 g of levain required for the loaf of bread over 12 hours.

In wither case you end up with 150 g of levain ready and able to lift a loaf of bread.  At any given room temperature yeast and LAB reproduce at a given rate.  IF you use a small amount if starter and loat of flour to build a levain you just have to wait for 12 hours for it to be ready to go.  If you feed a liquid starter at room temperature every day the 150 g is ready to go.

What happens at low temperature - 36 F, after a very long time, the LAB out reproduce the yeast by a factor if 3 to 1 - but very slowly becsue of the temperature.  After many weeks the starter has mire LAB to Yeast than one kept at room temperature making for a more sour bread since more LAB than yeast hit the mix.

Using whole grains for the feed will also produce a starter that has more LAB than a room temperature starter because the bran acts as a buffer to allow the LAB to continure to produce acid at a lower pH than normal.

Generally speaking yeast and LAB will continue to reproduce, make alcohol, CO2 and acids if there is enough food for them to do so but the rate at which they do this is dependent on the temperature.  Generally speaking yeast love 84 F and LAB love 92 F and at all room temperature LAB out reproduce yeast by a slight margin and there are at least 10 times more LAB than yeast to begin with but can be as high as 100-1.  At 92 F LAB out reproduce yeast by 10 to 1.  Yeast reproduce bout 80% faster at 84 F than they do at 72 F.

Since the bad wee beasties can quickly take over in an environment when the pH isn't low enugh dumping a whole bunch of flour on a small amount of starter would make an environment where the bad wee beasties could take over until the pH drops enough to kill them off.  SO really slow levain building could be a problem too. 

Luckily, wild yeast do not flocculate well at all and they suspended even though bread is not a liquid like wort is where they could clump together and fall to the bottomr.  Brewers yeast are designed to flocculate, clump, and fall to the bottom of the wort once the sugars have been converted enough so the beer is no longer sweet to the taste making the beer clear and not taste yeasty with suspended yeast in the wort making the beer easy to filter too.

Bread is way easier than beer making but the yeast used for the original commercialization of bakers yeast was derived from skimming off the top of fermenting beer (barm) rather than taking it from the bottom using flocculated yeast. 

Maverick's picture
Maverick

Just some quick notes about this part:

Does the same apply for the levain? If you use a 1:1:1 feeding schedule you will have a specific growth rate, all else being equal. With an increased ratio of 1:2:2, will the growth rate change? Is this important to know/control? Are there any advantages to be had by increasing this ratio i.e. what might be the products of increased growth rates?

Think about the yeast in terms of generations. The more food you give, the more generations can be created before they start to die off from lack of food. Since they don't really die off from "age" in the amount of times we are talking about, the ratio of flour will make a big difference in how many yeast are created and how long they can survive before they either start to die or go dormant (this would be the peak). Therefore, if you only feed 1:1:1, and it peaks in a few hours, but you leave it for 12 hours, you are going to have less yeast and less leavening power. Bacteria is a different story.

Of course if you feed too much then it is possible that foreign yeast can take hold and change the starter profile.

dabrownman's picture
dabrownman

with 111 or a 122 feeding.  But it will take longer for the wee beasties to go through twice as much food and get the levain to double in volume.   The wee beasties don't die or go dormant when the levain peaks - they just run out of enough food that they can get to.  IF you stir a doubled levain it will usually double again - easily and when it doubles again you can stir it again and it will usually double again.  You just make more food available to the wee beasties when stirring it.

philm63's picture
philm63

          dabrownman said: "What happens at low temperature - 36 F, after a very long time, the LAB out reproduce the            yeast by a factor if 3 to 1 - but very slowly because of the temperature.  After many weeks the starter has mire            LAB to Yeast than one kept at room temperature making for a more sour bread since more LAB than yeast hit           the mix."

This is very interesting. Without knowing how you maintain your starters (I can already see there are many ways to do it, and most of them are acceptable), reading the above makes me believe that if I left my starter/culture/mother (I named mine Mo (short for Mother)) in the fridge for a few weeks it would be as you say; more sour; I have to guess that this assumes I had a sufficient amount of good bacteria. But the yeast activity would be at a reasonably low level due to the low temperatures (36 or 37 F) which is why, I assume, we bring a refrigerated starter to room temperature and build the levain before baking bread to ensure a healthy colony of yeast and LAB. Making sure I understand this correctly; I'd only have to do this once, right? After a few weeks I should have a good size colony of good bacteria, right? And then I could/should resume feeding/refreshing it once a week? Do I have this right?

          dabrownman said: "Since the bad wee beasties can quickly take over in an environment when the pH isn't low             enough dumping a whole bunch of flour on a small amount of starter would make an environment where the                bad wee beasties could take over until the pH drops enough to kill them off.  SO really slow levain building                   could be a problem too."

So a smaller ratio, i.e. 1:1:1, will yield a faster reaction in your levain meaning the bad bacteria that may reside in the feed flour would not have a chance to take hold. So it’s not so much about what affect there might be on the final product, but rather the overall health of your levain which ultimately yields a more predictably tasty product, no?

 

dabrownman's picture
dabrownman

the LAB are out reproducing the yeast 3 to 1 it is very slow.  I can't taste the difference until 8 weeks or so.  It is really nice a 20 weeks.  Here is how I do my starter and 3 stage levain builds.

No Muss No Fuss Starter

Small amnts if lour added to a small starter amount say 10 g each of flour and water on 10 g of starter can't overwhelm it with bad wee beasties in the flour because the stater has an advantage and it is very acidic - less than 4 pH.  If you dump 100 g of flour on it with 100 g of water then the starter has much les of an advantage and the pH of the mix is much higher which could allow the bad wee beasties an edge.  This is why I do a 3 stage build so that the small starter is never overwhelmed with a bunch of flour at one time and the starter always has the sdvantage.

The best ways to increase the LAB to yeast ratio in your starter or levain is build the levain at 94 F.  At that temperature the LAB are outproducing the yeast at 13 to and they are really cranking.  I hour is like 12 weeks at 36 F.  The 2nd best way is to use whole grain flour.  

philm63's picture
philm63

...which it doesn't, then I should either feed it with some WW flour (perhaps a certain % of total feed flour (KA AP)?) or rig an ice chest with a Johnson A-419 controller and a warming blanket to achieve a steady 94 F and let my "just fed" starter take a 1-hour heat-soak? Or both?

I'd really like to have my starter be a bit more sour - granted it's still young, but perhaps I am not maximizing its opportunities to propagate those LAB's, no?

Lechem's picture
Lechem (not verified)

It was too sour till it balanced out and mellowed. My first sourdough breads were so sour it could raise welts on ones tongue. Now it's quite mellow and i'm trying to get more tang. Some advice for a more tang...

Whole grains, lower hydration for the starter and retarding the dough.

dabrownman's picture
dabrownman

with no maintenance because I don not want to be ties to it, mess with it or have any discards.  One other advantage is that it gets more sour too.

White flour starters kept on the counter at room temperature re designed to make the least sour bread possible.  The reason is because most people do not like sour bread.  For those of us who make whole grain breads and rye ones where acid is so important, we want a more sour levain to stanf up to the stronger flavored whole grain flour/

To get a more sour bread you can do all the work on the counter at 94 F if you have a proofing box whether it be levain builds, bulk ferments or proofing.  You can use whole grains in the starter and levain or even build bran levains like I do where the starter is fed bran sifted from the whole grains in the mix.  These levains tend to be nicely sour.

Here is a chart on how temperature effects LAB and yeast in a SD culture where two strains of LAB San Fran were used - this is Ganzel's data from his work showing the LAB reproductive advantage at a very fast rate at 90-92 F 

Reproduction Rates of LAB and YeastL/Y 
T(°F)T (°C)L. SF IL. SF IIYeastRatio
     36        20.0190.0160.0053.787
     39        40.0260.0220.0083.147
     43        60.0350.0310.0132.634
     46        80.0470.0430.0212.222
     61      160.1440.1500.1141.265
     64      180.1870.1980.1631.145
     68      200.2390.2590.2251.064
     72      220.3010.3320.2951.021
     75      240.3740.4160.3651.024
     79      260.4530.5080.4141.094
     82      280.5350.5980.4171.284
     86      300.6090.6720.3461.760
     90      320.6580.7060.2023.255
     93      340.6570.6710.05013.127
philm63's picture
philm63

...the ratio used for the levain (1:1:1 or 1:2:2 or higher) has little to do with the finished product other than to say a higher ratio simply gives more levain, with an increased risk of contamination by foreign beasties should the ratio go too high.

Now, in my original post I also introduced, however unqualified, the notion of hydration in the starter. I suppose this could also be seen as a ratio, so we are still on topic here. I always maintain my starter at 100% simply because I do not know any better. I've read (including in this thread, now) that a lower hydration starter will become more sour. How does this work? How would lowering the water activity increase acidity levels? Sounds almost counter-intuitive to me - so much to learn...

dabrownman's picture
dabrownman

promote the LAB not only to produce more acid but a different kind of acid - acetic as opposed to lactic.  The Detmolder starter and levain method takes advantage of this - Jeffery Hamelman explains it here

http://samartha.net/SD/procedures/DM3/DM3-Hamelman.html

One kind of acid makes the bread sour and the other makes is have 'tang'.  Having both is bread is very good indeed.

Bread making is pretty much science and math just like most everything else in the universe.

pmccool's picture
pmccool

use the site's Search tool to locate posts that discuss lag time or lag phase.  Those will provide some instruction about how starters and levains respond to different feedings. 

Paul