Cultures evolving and adapting to the environment?
New to this forum-- this is my first post. I've been baking sourdough breads for a year or so now, but am never satisfied with the taste of my finished product, mainly because the "sourness" flavor is not to my liking. Sure, I can make a loaf more or less sour by using a younger levain, multi-stage build, etc. However, this doesn't change the underlying flavor the bacteria adds to the bread.
I live in New Hampshire, and particularly like the taste of the loaves from Berkshire Mountain Bakery (where Chad Robertson got his start), Clearflour, and King Arthur. I've even purchased a starter from King Arthur, and it tastes/smells like their loaves, and the BMB and Clearflour loaves, so I think they all have the same dominant bacterial strain. However, when I tried to maintain the KA starter, it's taste/aroma changed over the course of a week, and now is very similar to the starters I've created at home from scratch.
My questions is: How do I keep the original qualities of a starter so that I can mimic the taste of these bakeries? Perhaps the issue is I'm feeding it different flour and this flour has a very agressive bacterial strain living on it? Or my environment is not suitable? Or maybe I don't know how to maintain a starter? :)
I feed twice daily, 12 hours apart, 1:5:5, and keep it in a proofing cooler at exactly 65 degrees to minimize variability.
And I say that with tongue only partly in cheek. There are numerous LAB strains that are "native" to humans, rather than to grain. It is possible that your sourdough is seeded with LAB that are from yourself, or your household, and that those LABs eventually come to dominate the other flavor-producing residents of your starter.
The again, it could be something else, entirely. Without some extensive and expensive DNA testing, it would be hard to know with any certainty.
Paul
Others more knowledgeable than I have already weighed in on your post, but I just have to mention that I experienced almost exactly the same thing. I got a jar of starter from KA over a decade ago and, at first, fed it KA bread flour religiously. Then, one thing led to another, and after about 7 years I found myself with no KA in the pantry and figured "What the heck?" and fed it with store-brand unbleached AP. Seemed to work okay, and was about 1/3 the price. It took a while, but over about 2 years I noticed the flavor was just... "off." As an experiment I divided it in two and fed one half with the AP, and the other half with the KA. After about a month the flavor of the KA starter came around to what I remembered. The AP starter did not improve.
It could all completely be in my head. I still will make breads with the AP, but I keep a bag of KA in the pantry just for feeding my culture, and I haven't had any reason to complain about the flavor any more.
I came across a research paper a while ago that was investigating the claim that sourdough cultures revert to wild-type yeasts from their surroundings over time. They essentially disproved that, and discovered that there are indeed strains of yeast indigenous to certain areas; but they are on the wheat, not floating around in your kitchen. This is what led me to try my experiment, since I figured that in Vermont the KA folks are feeding their own flour to their culture. It seems reasonable to hypothesize that a similar situation could be the case with the bacteria, but I have not personally seen any research to support that.
--Mike
about starter maint. may be helpful. Please tell more. What temp is the starter while feeding and growing. How does it react? What flour are you feeding? Do you let the starter peak in activity?
The maintenance routing has consisted of 2 feedings per day spaced out every 12 hours, +- 1 hour.
The starter is always kept in a proofing cooler, which I've varied from 64 to 75 degrees. At 70 degrees, the starter peaks in about 6 hours, so I've been keeping the temperature at about 64 degrees, so it now peaks in about 9-10 hours.
Even at 64 degrees the starter is active enough to reasonably leavin loafs.
With regards to to flour choice: I'm currently using 80% extraction freshly milled high protein hard white spring wheat, although I've experimented with several other wheat (all high extraction). Perhaps I need to use a more refined flour with less enzymes, etc?
into two. Feed one as you normally do and the other starter once a day or every two days. Might even try letting it peak at warmer temps and then return to the fridge.
My concern is that keeping the temperature low and the culture well fed (maybe overfed) could be limiting the bacteria that (what I believe) stabilizes and protects the culture.
It has been my experience that starving or stretching out the feeds is less detrimental to the culture than overfeeding it. Both over feeding and underfeeding can cause drastic hanges in the culture. What is the suggested maintenance routine for the desired starter?
Mini
I will try longer between feedings (and also more tests at higher temperature) and report back. The instructions for the KA starter are fairly vague: 1-2 times per day, that's all they say.
about the starter is on the KA site.
Just baked Pain au Levain this morning. It was purposely French - sweet with the smallest amount of sour offsetting the sweet taste of pure joy. Or so I thought. My ex-fiancé immediately responded that it wasn't sour enough to her liking. So it's back to stretching the levain ferment time and maintaining the temperature at around 77dF to benefit LAB development. Tasting the levain till the sour pops with the sweetness of the sugar converting carbohydrates yields the right time to begin dough development - what could be simpler? Only took 6-7 years to get the gist of how everything works in order to gain some semblance of control over the sensibilities of sourdough bread. It's the stuff that fills those pages in books on the subject which mention that this page is left intentionally blank...,
Wild-Yeast