April 17, 2018 - 4:21am
Do starters from different regions become similar when maintained at one location
I use a starter that I made. But I have also used a different starter (from a friend that lives thousands of miles away) to make the same bread and the taste are extremely different. Although, as I continue to refresh the new starter it quickly starters to taste like my original one.
Have others found this to be true? Do starters from different parts of the country quickly take on the characteristics of your original starter?
Dan
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I've made and worked with lots of different starters. In my experience, some starters will change when maintained in a new environment and some will remain true. Some change quickly, some change slowly, and some don't change at all. You never really know what you're gonna get when you start playing with a new starter.
Trevor
Their whole world SD bank depends on it not changing. When I comes to SD starters I think anything is possible and trying to domesticate these wee beasties is harder than we think.
https://www.puratos.com/commitments/next-generation/product-heritage/sourdough-library
Read the full explanation, not just the summary.
https://cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/57673/will-a-sourdough-starter-from-one-locale-change-to-yeasts-of-current-locale-over
Thank you so much for your answers to this thread and the links it does answer a lot that was going on in my mind.
Just asking as all of you above seem to have experience in this regard: If I make a new starter in my (same) home, with a different whole grain, (say whole wheat in place of rye) and then maintain it as I usually have been with white flour, is it likely to taste different from my first one?
Thank you so much again!
Katy, some think they will change and others don’t. My experience leads me to believe that they definitely do in my case. It may be the my flours, I suspect that to be the case for me.
When it comes to starters, dabrownman gets much respect. He is very knowledgeable on this and many things Bread. It may be that Puratos maintains their starters using laboratory like procedures I’d imagine they do. But my house and procedures are surely far more lax.
It is my understanding that the microbes in a new starter originate mainly from the flour. So, yes different flour, different starter characteristics. If possible, use organic whole grain flour. If you don’t have a mill, maybe you can get some Whole Wheat or Rye Berries and grind them in a coffee grinder or crush with a mortar and pestle. Fresh ground would be the absolute best.
Once the starter is active you can coax the flavor profile by changing the hydration and/or the temperature. You can also target the flavor during the fermentation of the dough. Warm temps flavor Lactic Acids (smooth yogurt-like) and cooler temps (Acedic Acids) bring out a sharper tang. It’s hard to describe flavor with words, IMO.
Let us know how your new starter turns out.
HTH
Dan
this is going to take some time but am so eager to work on it! thanks Dan!
Read all of this and see what you think:
http://robdunnlab.com/projects/sourdough/
With so many different yeast and LAB species in each and every starter you can see why commercial bakeries have labs that maintain and propagate pure strain starters which are then periodically shipped out to the distributed enterprise so that they can produce some semblance of consistent bread at multiple locations. It is affected by the flour, the starter, the temperature profile, the feeding cycle, and every small shift in process and ingredient used. So while you may maintain a starter using a consistent process, it can move around on you slowly just from normal small variations in what you do. But you can do the math and figure out how fast a bit player can become dominant (and how rare that is in the real world). But flour is not sterile, and microflora do compete, so things are likely to drift over time.
In my experience, yeasts are very much like people (Seriously!). They have different characteristics, they eat different diets, they behave differently, they work differently (some hard and some need coaxing) but all within a certain yeast-friendly range.
I grew a wild child starter once that would double/triple and act in every way like a starter except it lived at its own time pace-fast. It hated any form of retarding and would not completely raise a loaf-it fizzled part way through the job. It was started with AP flour and didn't like anything but that. It was definitely its own "person" but it was culled from the herd and went into pancakes one day-great pancakes,BTW.
My other starter of distinction is "Jack". He was found at a flea market in a little cellophane packet- a dried SD sold to tourists in San Francisco over 40 yrs prior. I "revived" him and have used him since. He smells unique -like fine wine- and has changed just a little over the last 10 yrs. but always maintains a certain "Jack" like behavior. My other 2 starters are now over 5 yrs old-one I started from fermented grapes (Grape) and one from a coworker who had it from a 70yr old family starter (Knott). All are maintained on AP, oft neglected in the refrigerator especially when I travel but always come back robustly when I get back and feed them. I can still tell by smell who Jack is and used to be able to tell who "Grape" is but not so much anymore. "Grape" and "Knott" have definitely become similar but are still strong and robust. Like an old married couple who start looking like each other.
So enjoy the "scenery" that nature provides in your starter as it ages and changes. It only gets better.
into the same one and the curator flushed then all down the drain
I think I understand more now. Dab’s comments about Puratos interested me. I know they are a world bank for hundreds of cultures. I assumed they maintained labratory conditions, and they do. The reason I think so many of us have seen different starters quickly take on the characteristics of our resident starters is because we don’t isolate them. But more so because they are fed with the same flour. Since it is commonly accepted that the micro-organisms come mainly from the flour.
On Puratos site they say, “The actual sourdoughs themselves are kept in optimal condition in refrigerators at 4°C/39°F and refreshed every two months with the original flour with which it was made, thereby replicating conditions in the original bakery.”
Sound thinking?
Dan
Here is a link to a piece I did last year to help me think about the underlying issues.
Thoughts on Sourdough Stability
Darn, Doc.Dough, I really wish I could understand the article. The thing I think I was able to understand is that a 10x or more feeding could introduce enough organisms to over whelm the culture.
Please break it down. I’d really like to learn.
Thanks,
Dan
You are dealing with large numbers (10E4 to 10E6 per gram of starter) and diluting them by a factor of 3 to 10 when doing a refreshment. Think about what happens if you have some badly contaminated flour with 10E2 bad actors per gram and lets say you use 1g of starter and add 10g of bad flour. You now have at least 10,000 good guys and 1000 bad guys in the mix. Over 24 hrs the good guys will grow to be 100,000 and the bad guys will grow to some final value that is greater than 1000. If they reach 10,000, they have matched the average growth of the principle constituent. If they reach any smaller number they are being diluted every time you refresh. If they exceed 10,000 they are competing with your starter. But to exceed 10,000 they have to replicate faster than any species in your original starter and since your starter has self-optimized (by natural selection) to be the best at replicating under the conditions you subject it to (temperature, hydration, food supply, competing species, ...) it is unlikely that a randomly introduced critter will out-replicate your baseline mix of yeast and LAB over a full growth cycle time after time to the point where it represents a significant fraction of the total. Thus when you see in Rob Dunn's data lots of different active species of yeast and LAB at concentrations that are 10 to 20 db down relative to the dominant ones, you can judge how hard it is to out compete the major strains. On the other hand, if you abuse your starter by changing the growth conditions on a continuing basis (temperature profile, food supply, hydration, pH, ...) you run the risk that a rogue actor will be able to outgrow your main line yeast and LAB by enough to eventually take over as the big dog on the block. So consistency in replication conditions becomes the barrier to instability in the population. It is instructive to remember that the LAB grow first because they have the highest growth rate, but slow down when the pH gets down below 4 while the yeast is pretty much dependent of the glucose density and is pretty insensitive to pH. Build a spreadsheet and populate it with multiple growth models and integrate the population densities over a replication cycle. The growth models don't need to be very complex to see what is going on but you do have to have some facility with Excel and the math to get started and the models have to communicate because you are assuming that they all live in the same soup.
Here is a link to a graphical depiction of species population vs time. Anybody trying to really understand what is going on should have questions
Starter stability diagram
Yeast and LAB are approximately right for some starter.
Contaminants are totally notional