The Fresh Loaf

A Community of Amateur Bakers and Artisan Bread Enthusiasts.

Time flexibility on fed starter: Mother's offspring

BarmBoy's picture
BarmBoy

Time flexibility on fed starter: Mother's offspring

I've been using a sour for about 7 years, no problems, mostly feeding and baking twice a week, sometimes twice a month, no problems. If I'm away for 10 days or more, I just pour off the grey water on top and proceed as normal. The question I have; once I've removed a portion for "tomorrow's" bread and fed the "mother" and it's "offspring", ok, two questions: What do you call the sour that you keep and feed forever and what do you call the sour that's going to go into the bread? I digress. The real question is how long can I keep the new-and-fed offspring before I should probably either just make some more or feed it? In other words, I couldn't get back home to make bread the next day, so even though the offspring has been in the fridge, is it best to consider it depleted and start over or do I have a few days to use it?

phaz's picture
phaz

Think this way - you start with something, so that's a starter. If you use that to preferment some portion, that would be a preferment (also guess by many other names, all the same thing).

There is, at the very least, a bit of leeway as to when exactly it's used - in other words feeding a little extra or less often or less food more wouldn't make too much difference. As always, you proceed through the different stages depending on the dough. Enjoy! 

Benito's picture
Benito

I think most bakers will call the sour that you keep in propagating the starter.  The offshoots you make starting with a portion of the starter that you then I use to leaven bread is generally called the levain.

So if you’ve allowed your levain to peak and you cannot bake with it and it hasn’t collapsed into a soupy mess, then if you put it into a cold fridge, it should be fine for at least overnight if not even up to a day or more.  I’ve done this overnight in the fridge of my levain and haven’t had problems with that.  I haven’t tested longer periods of time than that.  Another option if your levain has peaked and you cannot use it right away, is that you could give it a small feed to get it to the time that you can bake with it.

Benny

foodforthought's picture
foodforthought

Benny’s terminology is the way I think of my yeasty friends as well.

I generally make a new 150 gram batch of starter every month or two by overproducing levain for a batch of bread. So 50 g of levain plus equal parts flour and water and my new starter batch is ready for the fridge. At 5-10 g of starter fed for three successive 12-hour generations, to yield 300+/- g of levain, the 150 g batch takes a while to deplete.

I have left the starter unfed and unused in the fridge for up to 3-4 months during pre-COVID travel and have had no problem refreshing.

BarmBoy's picture
BarmBoy

So, using my recently learned terminology, what is the thinking for how long the levian will stay good in the fridge before needing to either toss or feed before mixing it into the dough?

foodforthought's picture
foodforthought

I have occasionally held fully-ripe, ready-to-use levains and poolish for 4, maybe 6 hours in the fridge with no discernible issues. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you could get away with significantly longer, but not by design. Life does happen and sometimes dough just has to wait for us… I think I’ve seen discussions on this topic here in the past. Pretty sure frequent contributor, Mini Oven, has commented on this very topic more than once.

Good luck,

Phil

happycat's picture
happycat

Depends on fridge temperature, shelf in the fridge (huher and lower can be diff temps) strength of levain, amount fed...

put an elastic around the container to show original level and you can find out by checking over time for your fridge.