Mature starter suddenly weakened
Hi, I am new to posting on the forums and hope I am following protocol all right...
We are suddenly having a major problem with our established starter. It's about nine months old, and we primarily use it for pizza dough. Up until about 10 days ago it's been wonderful--very resilient and effective, making our pizza dough rise quickly and making great, airy dough.
About two weeks ago it suddenly seemed to weaken. It still smells great and bubbles, but it just isn't aggressive enough; we use a 70% hydration no-knead recipe and even after 18 hours in warm temperatures, the dough doesn't rise enough and is glue-y and hard to handle---impossible for making pizza. The baffling thing is that for many months, our recipe and process worked great. We can't figure out what has suddenly changed.
Up until now, we have been a bit laissez-faire with the starter; it usually gets fed twice a day when it's room temperature but we haven't always discarded starter--sometimes we just feed it--and the timing of our feeding hasn't been precise. For the past few days, though, we have been maintaining a schedule of feeding it every 12 hours and discarding some starter each time, so we aren't starving the yeast. It gives off a good scent and bubbles when it is fed, but our final dough is a glue-like mess.
Here are some basic details, in case they help:
Our starter has 100% hydration; our final pizza dough is 70%
We use Central Milling Artisan Craft flour, with 11.5% protein.
Our preferment is about 1/3 starter, 1/3 flour, and 1/3 water. It comprises 20% of the final dough.
We use a recipe based on Lahey's no-knead pizza dough, with a bulk ferment of about 12-18 hours, depending on the surrounding temperature.
This process has worked really well for us for about 8 months, and we are stumped. Moreover, we run a business that uses this starter; hence my panic. We have a couple back-up starters but they've all stopped being effective.
Thanks for your patience--I'm probably overloading on the detail because I'm freaking out. Any suggestions are much appreciated!
By giving it some jolly good feeds and allowing it to peak at room temperature before repeating a few times. Sounds like these poorer feeds have whittled down the yeasts and made it overly acidic favouring bacteria fermentation.
Ideally you wish to find a maintenance schedule with no discard but still maintaining these strong feeds. But for now some discard is inevitable.
Now when you say your starter feed is about 1/3rd of starter to water to flour what do you mean? By weight or volume?
How much starter do you aim to keep at any one time? Roughly by weight.
Yes, I think we have not been discarding enough lately. We checked the pH of the starter and it was a very acidic 3.8! Normally we use quite a bit of starter, but we hadn't been making as much dough in the last week so we weren't using up the starter, and we hadn't been discarding enough either. We dumped out the majority and gave it a good feeding and will be discarding regularly again. We'll keep everyone posted on how it fares. Thanks for your reply!
To answer your previous questions, our preferment build is by weight, so we take for example 100g starter, 100g water, and 100g flour. I may have mistakenly called it a starter feed. Our starter feed is still equal weights of flour and distilled water to keep the hydration at 100% but the amount of starter we discard differs depending on how much starter we have.
Roughly by weight, we try to keep about 1000g grams of starter on hand which we use to make preferment builds for large batches of pizza dough. One batch of pizza dough which makes about 34 250g balls uses about 1000g of preferment.
You may wish to keep just enough so that after you've taken off however much starter you need for the pizza dough then you can feed it well enough without needing to discard. As a rule bigger feeds and left to fully mature at room temperature will help take care of those yeasts. But for troubleshooting please see Mini's comments below.
Another option for when you have sorted your starter out is to keep just a little starter at any one time and then take some off to build a levain. It's a good way to manage your starter as a levain build will mean it's always freshly feed with a good feed, you don't have to keep much starter and there will be no, or little, discard. Then you top your starter back up with a healthy feed and so on.
So you want 1000g of starter for your daily batch.
you can either keep 50g starter and feed it 500g water + 500g flour the day before. A 1:10:10 very healthy feed. Allow that to mature and take off 1000g for your bake. Pop the remaining starter in the fridge. Or if you bake really often and need it on the go then leave at room temperature. Then again feed the remaining 50g with 500g water + 500g flour etc.
Or at the beginning of the week you can build 375g starter. Once mature pop it into the fridge. Everyday take off 50g and do the feed as above (1:10:10). At the end of the week you'll be down to 25g. Simply feed that 25g with 175g water + 175g flour (1:7:7). Allow that to mature and place back in the fridge. So your starter maintenance + your levain builds always have good feeds keeping your yeast population healthy. And no discard.
Just two ideas you can work on. But only after you've followed Mini's troubleshooting advice.
P.s. you do lose a bit through fermentation so just adjust and build a little extra if you see this happening.
Check out this thread from a while back, especially Mini Oven's advice part way down the thread. There's some good information here!
I would read the link... it deals with new starters. And if you have any problems during the night, I pop in during the night as I'm 14 hours ahead of your time. So when everyone is sleeping in the Sierras, I'm awake here in Laos... makes for some funny clumps of comments in the discussion section. I'm not an expert by all means and if your starter is not a "wild" starter, please say so. Not all yeast go dormant and some may have simply died off. But there are Loafers here that can help. There might even be some nearby with a starter to offer for immediate rescue.
:) Mini
when the starter is very mature (and it gets that way fast with warm seasonal changes) and pH drops low for a long period of time, is that the yeast may have decided to stop multiplying, preserving themselves for a time when more food is available. The starter then has a lag time after being fed to get back up to working.
Then it is a serious business to wake up the yeast in the starter and get their numbers back up. Rapid discarding and sudden overfeeding by the clock is then not the answer. It becomes a case of not "throwing the baby out with the bath water." It becomes a process of raising pH enough with very special attention given to keeping these yeast and not diluting them yet keeping the bacteria at bay. Feed a small portion of the flat starter is the right step but instead of discarding, add another amount of flour and water and wait for a response. Keep to room temps around 75-76°F to encourage the growth of yeast over bacteria which prefer warmer temps.
You are basically back to step 4 of "making a starter." You have the bacteria, you have dormant yeast and you have some fresh yeast with a large assortment of yeast and bacteria waiting to take advantage of an unprotected starter. You will need a notebook. So don't raise the pH too far up the scale but with enough flour to let the dormant yeast know they can now get active. Once every 24 hrs. Increase feeding when the yeast show themselves. It takes a sane mind to race and check on s5 starter at the same time so best of luck and patience to you. Take a deep Breath.
My suggestion is to set up some jars for the best chance of recovery. The amounts don't have to be large, starting with 50g is enough and using pint size containers for easy handling. Stir several times a day and don't discard.
It took time to get the starter into this condition so it is logical it will take some time to get it out of its catatonic one. Good luck on the new starter.
contains no minerals or salts that may be essential to the organisms living in the starter. Something to think about.
Also you may want to consider feeding the starter a higher portion of flour when it stands at room temp and the temps are warmer. A one to one ratio of starter to flour weight is more of a beginning starter feeding and refrigerated starters where a short fermentation is desired to bring the starter to maturity. The other option is to lower the hydration of the starter in warm conditions (adding back the water during mixing up the dough so as to not disrupt the recipe too much.)
Changing to a lower hydration starter will also require a lag time for a few feeds following the reduction of water. So when changing over I would make an overlapping and not change from one day to the next. Continue using 100% hydration starter until the lower hydration starter has made the change over in about 3 days time. Then increase the amount of lower hydration starter to replace part of the higher one. The reverse process goes much faster when cold weather comes and the temps drop. If you find the low hydration starter too strong with yeast, use less of it.
Has your air temperature changed?
Thanks so much, everyone, for your advice and support--it means a lot, and these are really helpful ideas. We're moving forward with our efforts to revive our yeast, with some definite direction now.