March 26, 2009 - 9:40am
Flour for Carl Griffiths Oregon Trail Starter
I'm about to activate my Carl Griffiths Oregon Trail mail order starter and was wondering if it mattered what kind of flour I activate it with. (I only have enough start to try once, and if it doesn't work I have to wait 3 weeks to get another one, so I'm nervous) I have rye flour that i was planning on using, but I thought I read somewhere that white was better for this starter. anybody know?
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I always start of with organic all purpose flour. I do this to avoid adding additional yeasts and bacteria which might compete with your starter.
Hi there...I would suggest using unbleached all-purpose white flour to activate the Carl's starter. Even better if you can use organic, but not necessary. Reason being is that this is a nice mild-flavored starter that already has an established culture of symbiotic LBs and yeast.
Using rye flour is great to create a brand new starter from scratch because it has a lot of yeast on it naturally. Others may have had a different experience, but I have found that regular feeding of a starter, regardless of how it was initated, with rye flour will also make the starter much more sour than one fed with white flour. If you like extra sour, that would be fine, but if you want to first experience what I think the original Carl's starter is probably like, using white flour (as suggested in the instructions) will enable you to taste the flavor complexity that this starter contributes to baked goods without the influence of the extra sour rye flavor. Just my 2 cents though. Any flour will probably work fine.
I feed my Carl's starter with a mix of 75% white AP flour and 25% whole wheat flour, but I activated it with all AP flour when I first got the start. (I also maintained a 100% home-made rye starter for a long time and it was extremely sour - great in some breads, but rather awful in sweet doughs or wafffles.)
thanks! It's getting started with sourdough is tough for me because I'm too much of a "thinker" when I should be more of a "doer" I guess I just hate to see things go to waste so I want to do it right the first time, you know? I really want to have a successful start because sourdough is my personal chocolate, and I have so many questions! :)
I received the same starter few months ago. Since it was my first time, I took onefourth of the teaspoon supplied by Carl-- and built it up a doubling it at a time and built the quantity up. I had two cupful before I knew it. I took one cup of it and dried it so I had ample back up just in case.
nijap