Oops! I may have destroyed my starter.
I have a two year old starter that has served me well. This evening I was assembling sourdough waffle batter. Since I'm a bit lactose intolerant I usually substitute rice milk for regular milk and it always works great: light, fluffy, delicious waffles. (My wife and 18 month old like them too.) In a moment of inattentiveness, I poured the rice milk not into the waffle batter, but into my container of starter! Darn.
After a few seconds of jaw-dropping disbelief, I poured off the rice milk and transferred the remaining starter to a clean container. I'm leaving it loosely covered out on the counter overnight to see if it will remain active. I guess time will tell if it's okay or not, but do you think I've ruined it by introducing weird, undesirable bacteria? If anyone's pulled a similar boneheaded move with their starter and has anything to share about recovering from it, I'd appreciate hearing about it.
Thanks,
Michael
ouch, and wish I could help. but, would it be possible to remove some starter from below the surface, hopefully where the rice milk didn't get into the starter much? you could use a little of that, little as a teaspoon, and build it up again. you could use that as a back up just in case the milk does some damage - which I don't think you'll have a problem with anyway, it sounds like you got it quick, there probably isn't much in there anyway. do let us know joie it goes. I'm sure others would be interested, and good luck! hate to see a good starter go
:)
If bacteria were that easy to kill, antibiotics would be free. Unless you know something about rice milk that I don't, I agree with Mini that your starter will shrug off that tiny insult with a grin. Just refresh your "contaminated" starter (take out ~10 gr of it) and add water and flour to that as your normally do (i.e., whatever hydration you normally maintain it at). Put it in your favorite starter growing spot and let it do its thing. Might take another refreshment for your starter to get its mojo back, but I doubt even that will be needed.
Every time I think I've nuked my starter (usually because I've left it at warm (summer) room temp for a day or two longer than I should have without refreshment), I just think It's been a long time since I made a new starter -- I'm out of practice. Maybe this will be an opportunity. In every gram of flour, there's a new starter waiting to be born. Nothing to worry about.
Tom
Except he sniffed out instead of in.... Should be interesting. My starter is still alive. It's going to be a family secret. Lol
Feeding your starter the same old thing is the best way to kill it I'm thinking\ :-) I've tried killing mine every way possible and feed ti so much different stuff it can fend off anything. It especially likes NF milk, whey and or potato water, beer,wine, citrus juice, potatoes or potato flakes of any kind, any grain of any kind, any rice, many dried milled beans or any combination.
I searched this on TFL but returned an error. I have a starter that I have been using since July, keep in the fridge, feed every 3 days. What if I want to go on vacation?
Rye and ww starter in the fridge and never feed it for 3 weeks. I bake one loaf of bread out of it for 3 weeks using 10-20 g each time. After the 3rd week I feed it back to 80 g over 3 stages and in the fridge it goes. It could probably go a month easy at 60% hydration and 100 g where the last feeding is flour only and let it rise 25% before it hits the cold. No worries
Will it die?
Yeast likes 82 F the best and Labs prefer slightly higher 96 F So on the counter top, the starter will love it much better than the cold if you want to promote yeast growth. The problem is that since both yeast and labs are reproducing much faster at those higher temperatures you have to feed the culture more and more as it eats though its food faster and faster. If you don't bake every day then it gets to be an expensive waste as most of the starter gets tossed and it takes more of your time.
The fridge slows everything down but at 36 F the Labs while reproducing very slowly are reproducing 3 times faster than they do at that temperature. So cold not only makes life much easier for starter maintenance and gets rid of the waste, it also promotes a more sour bred when it is inoculated with a starter that has many more labs in it than yeast.
I cal it the no feeding, no waste, no muss, no fuss starter than makes way more sour bread than any other i have found to date. Some folks don't like sour though so..... to each their own
Happy baking
I meant to post this a week ago. As several people on this thread predicted, my starter is just fine. I kept it at room temp for a few days, feeding daily, then transferred to the fridge, feeding a couple times a week. I've baked a white whole wheat loaf, and made pizza and waffles with it. Very alive.
Thanks everyone for your feedback and encouragement.
Michael