July 30, 2015 - 5:36am
Simple sourdough starter? Just flour + yogurt (Italian cooking show): Thoughts?
Thought I would pass this along for discussion. I have not tried it, as I have a mostly whole grain wheat starter going at the moment.
This is an Italian language cooking show but with english language voice-over: YellowSaffron Sourdough starter recipe. The recipe is also in the video description (expand on YouTube). Have not tried it yet... wondering what sourdough afficianados think of the idea?
This channel also has lots of other episodes on bread.
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are not the same as what is in a SD starter. After 14 days of refreshment, the right LAB delivered in the flour have taken over the culture and she has a proper SD starter, The only thing she did was slow the whole process by about 4-5 days by using yogurt in the beginning mix. Not all LAB are the same.
Using 30% of the weight of the dough for the levain amount is 3 times what I use in the summer and twice what I use in the winter.
In her presentation, she mentions that the yogurt helped to feed the yeast and bacteria found in the flour and air. So, I'm not sure that they are counting on the LAB in the yogurt for inoculating the starter. It is a little confusing because I don't know that yogurt is food for the yeast and bacteria that she is trying to establish in her starter. However, I wonder if the acid in the yogurt wouldn't be beneficial to the starter environment like pineapple juice. In any case, they do seem to end up with what looks like a healthy and viable starter.
lower the pH of the starting mix to keep the bad LAB at bay in the beginning is a good one. - like pineapple juice. LAB in the flour really start out much faster than yeast and populate the mix much faster than yeast in new cultures so they are going to produce metabolic by products that the yeast can use for food as they begin to propagate at a later and slower rate. The enzymes in the flour that are release hen the it become wet, break down starch into maltose the LAB prefer and it is the enzyme maltase that breaks down maltose into glucose the yeast prefer. Adding a bit of diastatic malt to the mix in the beginning will provide plenty of additional maltase to the initial mix which would be much better than adding a huge pile of the wrong LAB that is adapted to low pH like the wrong one found in yogurt which will be much more difficult for the right LAB to replace than the wrong LAB found in the flour that isn't adapted to lo pH
I think adding a huge pile of yogurt will just slow the process down overall. Better to use a bit of pineapple juice and diastatic malt in the mix of flour and water and get there 4 days to a week faster. Joe Ortiz's milk, water, WW and cumin mix and Hamelman's rye and water mix both make SD starters in 3-5 days which are very stable in 5-7 days from my experience. Both of these use whole grains which have way more existing natural populations of LAB and yeast you want than white flour. I think this is the most important thing in making a starter reliably and fast - use whole grains.
This one will work as so many starter methods do but it just takes more time and flour to do it and I'm guessing it isn't as reliable. Lucy is working on a No Mus No Fuss Starter From Scratch that incorporates her favorite methods she has picked up over the years including Mini Oven's Not So Ancient WW Starter in a week method made in a brown paper bag filled with flour . She is being pretty secretive about it but should post on it soon.
Happy baking.
Did a search for: sourdough starter yogurt
under Google.com/books and found the following:
In my relatively small time (5 years) making natural levian (aka. sourdough), based on my own experiences, what I've done, read, heard, etc. my unscientific reckoning is that its just yeast with the added bonus of being a yeast that can tolerate an acidic environment - and fortunately there are some handy bacteria that can live & thrive in the same environment that make it slightly acidic. The acid acts as a preservative helping to keep any spoilage organisms at bay. Anyone who gets mould growing in their starter jars is doing something very wrong in my book.
So we have a main yeasty beasty and 1 or more lacto bactos living in the same medium - I don't think it's a true symbiotic environment but just one that seems to work well together - happy coincidence?
The yeasts and bacteria are present of most stuff that lives - apples and grapes being the easy to see ones (to make cider and wine from!) but its also present on the husks of wheat, rye, etc. and that's one reason to use organic/un-sprayed stoneground grains to get your starters going with. We've been exploiting these yeasts for millennia too in the form of drinks and bread making is at least 8000 years old according to the historians...
I've only ever made my starters with flour and water and the last one I did was just an experiment to see what I'd do in the unlikely event I lose all 3 jars currently sitting in my fridge. It was ready to make bread in 6 days but it felt a bit "rough" which I'm sure would have benefited for another week or 2 of maintenance. (or regular use). Probably still had some yeasts/bacteria clinging on before the acidic environment was fully developed that would kill them off.
My thoughts are that adding in other acidic "stuff" on day 1 may help to kill off the natural yeasts that don't like an acidic environment earlier than would maybe happen just letting the acid producing bacteria do their thing, but once you get into the system of feeding just flour and water then ... well that's that - you have a viable starter to use directly or make/bulk up more levian.
My own, and again unscientific thinking is that the flour has a bigger impact on the starter than anything else - I noticed this when I switched flour brands a few years back - it was still a sourdough starter, but its texture and smell changed a little. (and I regularly taste test my starters - just to make sure they're still what I expect - again, unscientific, but I noticed on a recent UK TV program that the very first test on some milk coming into a large processing plant was a human smelling and tasting the raw milk!)
I do think variety is the spice of life though and its fascinating to see just how many ways there are to make a starter (and use it!) People will advocate various methods because that's what's worked for them - for me, basic flour and water has worked so that's what I advocate...
I'm also about to switch flour brands again - moving from roller milled organic white to stone ground & sifted organic slightly off-white (as it still has some wheatgerm in it) and it will be interesting to see how my wheat based starter changes with this new flour. 164Kg delivered tomorrow although it'll be a week or so before I start using it.
I've been meaning to do a blog post on making a sourdough from scratch - maybe that time is now!
-Gordon
Ps. on the subject of sourdough starter longevity - I'm fairly sure that after a few weeks of regular use there is virtually nothing left of the original stuff you started with - grandfathers axe/Theseus' paradox syndrome, or for UK folks, Triggers Broom.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUl6PooveJE