Slowing the starter
Hi All, I have generally been following the guideline that when you feed the starter, you double it each time, i.e., if starting with 100g of starter, when you feed it, you need to get it to 200g, then 400g, etc....I follow a 100% hydration starter that i built years ago, following Nancy Silverton's instructions.
So, it becomes a pain to feed the starter 3 times or more per day....so i had this thought, can i slow down this process by increasing the amount of flour and water i add to the starter when i feed. I think i have gotten some good results...so, instead of doubling the starter when i feed it, i increase by more, start with 100g starter and build it to 300g. What this enables me to do is to feed the starter only twice per day, morning/night.
Any thoughts here? Am i messing up my starter in any way. Am i wrong to do this? Will i somehow dilute the starter rendering it useless? Would love to hear from some pros on this.
BTW, i am making killer bread....so it does not seem to hurt.
There are a few things you can do that will make the burden smaller.
The first thing I'd recommend is to reduce the amount you keep by quite a lot. You can easily and safely cut it down to 50g, which should save you quite a lot on flour and effort.
Next, increase the amount of you feed it and decrease the amount of starter you keep. Of that 50g starter you keep, about 10-15g should be from the previous starter.
Finally, you could always refrigerate the starter four hours after feeding. If you take it out and feed it once a week, leaving it out for four hours again before putting it back, you can keep that starter indefinitely.
Otherwise, if you like the taste of the bread you're making, keep doing what you're doing. The part that matters is that you like it. Starters are extremely resilient once they're established, and it takes quite a bit of neglect and poor treatment to ruin one.
I refrigerate my starter as well and then you can keep it for a week between feeding, just bring it out and feed it the night before you plan to use it. I have successfully used it straight out of the fridge as well. Another way to lengthen the time between feedings is to reduce the hydration of the starter. I have reduced the hydration to the point were it forms a dough ball and that stayed in the fridge for over three weeks, when we came back from our holiday a couple of feedings brought it back to normal.
Gerhard
Thank you both. To me. the burden is the feedings, not the size of the starter after feeding....i somehow have been in the habit of using 500g of starter (usually 20-30% of the total weight of my recipe) when making bread...between striving for the perfect loaf of bread, feeding the family and offering bread to friends, i make big batches!
It sounds as if i am not hurting my starter or missing out on other results by what i have been doing.
Thanks again,
jak
I was given a starter many years ago. I've fed it now and again, without any regularity, since. It's doing just fine, thank you very much. Sometimes I don't feed it for a month. Longtime regular readers may recall that my brother took some of my starter, put it in his fridge and promptly forgot about it for many months. I told him to try feeding it in the regular fashion. He did and it perked right up. A month ago I dried out and crumbled some it to take across the continent to bake there. It was carried in the hold of the jet. I refed it when I arrived at the kitchen I was going to use three days later. It perked up as expected.
What I think is that there's lot of hooey out there about how to handle these cultures. They can take a lot of knocking around. I also think that refridgeration's effect is to slow down the multiplication of the little buggies and that freezing at home freezer temperatures slows them even more but doesn't kill them. If it did kill them, then how would I explain why a formed loaf formed prior to the second rise simply rises when thawed if allowed to sit at a warm temperature.
These beasts are a hardy lot. I have tried very, very hard to kill my SD starter off for 39 years by; not feeding it, drying it out on purpose and by mistake, putting it on a starvation diet for years, freezing it, nuking it, heating it, cooling it, etc - you name it yet I haven't come close to killing it. It will easily outlive me. I keep getting older but it keeps getting younger :-)
and improved, but gosh, I'm not as simple as a yeast.
Yes, yes, come join the starter abusers club! Always abusing within the limits with live starters nearby!
" ...and we had fun fun fun till her daddy took the T-bird yeasties awa-a-ay." :O
I guess if everyone knew how easy it was to (re)produce bakery style breads at home, things like sourdough loses it's mystique....no worries, secret is safe with me :)
The whole story about the Jews and matzohs speaks to the fact that there were leavened and unleavened breads that long ago. If SD baking was all that difficult, then there would've been at least one covered wagon functioning as a bakery going across our country from East to the West Coast in the 1800's. Actually, every wagon with a woman on it carried its own starter. And none of the travelers were rocket scientists.
You can also add a pinch of salt to slow things down. Percentagewise similar to what you'd use in a bread dough, or even a bit more.
I use this here in Virginia when it's summer and the kitchen is 80-90 degrees F, and I don't want to refrigerate. It seems to help.