Hello from Arkansas and Sourdough Starter question
Hey guys. I'm from Northwest Arkansas. I recently discovered this site. I've been lurking around reading stuff. Very cool.
I'm a relative novice bread maker. I got a bread machine years ago and made a whole grain dough (mix of about 8 grains, seeds and stuff, and lots of extra gluton). Once I kind of mastered that mix, I just made that every week for a couple of years.
A friend recently mentioned sourdough and I had recently started working from home. Being at home all the time would make starter maintenance no problem at all, so I made a starter. Anyway, fast forward a few months and dozen or so loafs in...
I had read somewhere that you could dry your starter out and grind it into a powder, keep it frozen and then use it to resume a starter later. I was only making about a loaf a week and throwing out that excess starter every day seemed so wasteful, so I got this idea and I started drying out the excess starter. I kept a cookie sheet on the counter under an air vent and I just spread out all the excess starter on it with a knife. By the next morning it'd be dry. Peel it up, throw it in the blender and add it to my jar.
Pretty quickly I had a big jar full of excess starter in my freezer. I ran a few tests of re-constituting the starter from water and a few days of feeding (3-4). Seems to work like a charm.
So I stopped maintaining a live starter. Once I filled up my jar, I just started operating off of that. About 3-4 days before I plan to make a loaf, I take 2 teaspoons of my dried starter (which is nothing, really) and mix it with about 4 teaspoons of flour, add a little water to get the consistency where I want it and then I feed it about 1-2 teaspoons, twice a day. Then the day I'm going to make the dough, I feed it a decent amount and when it's ready, throw it all into the dough.
Anyway, I'd be curious to know if there are any disadvantages to this. I'm not trying to do great loaves of bread. I'm just trying to make a decent tasting sourdough for my sandwiches and I'm pretty happy with the flavor. But I'm curious if there is some reason others might not want to do this...
Anyway, cool site. Thanks...