April 30, 2021 - 6:06am
Starting a starter with vinegar?
I heard about pineapple method. Debra said it was hard to control pH with vinegar, so what i thought -i have ph meter and could use pipette to add vinegar just enough to lower feeding solution pH to 4,0-4,5. Is that viable? Or does vinegar have a specific slowing effect on yeast, that is not attributed to its low pH if added in uncontrolled quantities?
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Yes, of course, you can acidify your first batch of spontaneously fermenting dough with anything edible.
- vinegar (pure acetic acid solution) or pure lactic acid solution
- sour fruit juices (fresh apple juice, fresh grape juice), sometimes if form of grated apple or pounded grapes added to flour-water blend
- yeasted brews: beer, kvass, kefir, kombucha or a simple water brew (1 cup of water, 1 spoon of sugar, 1 tsp of yeast in 1 hr will give you acidic solution with low pH)
- water and pulp from soaking bread from commercial bakery ( bread can be yeasted or sourdough, it doesn't matter, it has low pH and is rich in organic acids)
- sour cream, commercial kefir w/o yeast, yogurt or sour whey drained from yogurt et al. as sources of lactic and acetic acid solution.
You can find recipes for sarters with all of those in literature and online; alone or in combinations. It's a general idea that matters: either acidify the first dough naturally with stinky bacteria from flour, or add something to the first dough to block, supress or kill those stinkers right away.
Quick starters can be obtained both ways, with or without acidifiers.
Temperature and flour choice matters more than acidification though. But if you combine temperature control with acidification, then you get yourself the most efficient way o developing great sourdough cultures from scratch.
Acid doesn't slow down yeast. Yeast doesn't care about acid until pH goes down below 2.0 which never happens in sourdough.
This is very reassuring. I have kinda slow starter, i think it might have too much leuconostoc[despite pleasant smell i still think the balance is off, and there's not much yeasts, maybe something else is producing gas?], so i might start again. This time it will be made by acidification method with vinegar.
Also i will make sure that my starter is mature enough before refrigerating. I've made a mistake of refrigerating a seven day starter, probably the culture wasnt established enough, given the modern flour that has lots of leuconostoc. Also whole wheat seems to have highest yeast content, so thats what i will use next time, mixed with some rye flour for LAB growth.
Apologies if visiting this partially old thread is uncouth but my mind operates in nonlinear form like a good director e.g., Nolan and Tarantino.
Acidity in general is a deterrent to microbial activity because it affects a biological response to environmental conditions.
Yes, yeasts are sufficiently hardy when it comes to environmental pH, but do they care about it...?! They do indeed, as would any microbe. Hence the search for low pH to create long-time stored foods and beverages safe and stable.
It would be true that yeasts can tolerate lower and more frequent fluctuations in pH compared to LAB, yet we cannot say that yeasts can handle any extremes!
I know of one source which states that yeast fermentation and growth kinetics are not affected above pH 3.5, however below this pH, yeasts will indeed struggle with the environmental conditions. This being considerably far removed from your stipulations of pH regarding what you said about “caring”!
Most importantly, given the context of the question, it would be fair to say you missed a significant point. And that is, generally all yeasts are quite averse to acetic acid in its undissociated form, this occurring in majority at a pH below its pKa.
Still, in terms of starting a starter, indeed anything will do, because it is a multi-stage process that continuously constitutes a different composition with manual actioning.
Please take in kind,
Michael
Hi Michael,
thank you for your contribution to this topic! Very much appreciated, especially since I am very much against using straight acetic acid in starter development or in bread. I tend to rely on anything else, but vinegar, because in my experience it just doesn't work as well as other acidifiers. Maybe I am unlucky and it works for other people but not me for some reason, I tried vinegar in starters at least a dozen of times and invariably got very strange and undesirable outcomes. But some of my friends swear by vinegar in their starters, in the initial stages of starter development, and they are great bakers. And acetic acid bacteria are found in sourdough starters anyways... They are very common in starters, naturally.
In developing a starter from scratch of course bakers use acetic acid to suppress everything, both yeasts/fungi and pH sensitive bacteria in the initial stages.
Acetic acid and low pH are well known food preservatives.
Normally, when developing starters from scratch, acid is added only to the level of pH equal to 4.0-4.5, slightly acidic to taste, enough to suppress unwanted bacteria, specifically, the stinky bacteria which people don't like and perceive as failure in making a starter. These propagate between pH 4.0-9.5. Yeasts propagate all the way down to pH equal to 2.0. Some yeasts are osmotolerant or osmophilic and will multiply very well even in the range of pH equal to 2.0-3.0, there is plenty of research done on those.
So, yes, you are right, sourdough yeasts do care, some more some less, and they are sensitive to acetic acid. I mostly focused on pH, not on vinegar when I said that they don't care about low pH until it goes down to 2.0. They will continue to survive and propagate even in conditions not seen in starters with their buffering effects. I got this fact from Handbook of Dough Fermentations (Kulp&Lorenz, 2003) years ago and it sort of stuck in my memory and helped me to be relaxed and not caring that much about my starter going below pH of 4.0 or even below pH of 3.2-3.5. I know that sourdough yeasts continue to propagate at those values even if bacteria won't. For as long as there is sugar and not too much alcohol in their environment, they will continue to propagate at low pH.
best wishes,
m.