Age of starter for use in recipes...
I have a pretty active whole wheat sourdough starter going now, almost 2 weeks old. I've been having to feed it twice a day. It's kept on the counter top, between 68-70 degrees.
Some recipes call for "refreshing" a bit of starter for a few hours before using the whole refreshed amount in a recipe. Other recipes just say "sourdough starter" but don't qualify an age.
How do you prep your sourdough starters for a recipe? Do you refresh for a few hours, or use directly from an overnight on counter? I am baking with mostly 100% whole wheat.
This morning I put together a 90% whole wheat pizza dough- and used some of the starter straight from the jar that's been on the counter for 12 hours. The starter smelled a bit "sweet" like ripe fruit, is this alcohol? I'll be curious how it turns out. I made a sourdough loaf a couple of days ago with starter that was refreshed for 3 hours before use, and the flavor was great. I made sourdough English muffins yesterday using leftover starter that was kept in the fridge for 4 days- they tasted good too, maybe a bit more sour than the bread the other day.
Thanks.
Chad Robertson likes to use 'young' white Starter, one that has been fed 1 1/2 hours before use. Some use theirs right out of the fridge after being in there all week and right in the dough it goes.
Mine is a rye starter that is stored in the frdige fir up to 20 weeks so i like to do a 3 stage levain build and use it after it doubles after the 3rd 4 hour progressively large feeding most of the time. Sometimes i use the detmolder process for a levain build where hydration and temperatures are varied to bring out different flavors of the levain. Sometimes I use different flour at each stage.
Some recipes call for a a starter that was fed and has risen and collapsed before using., The Hamelman Dark Pumpernickel uses a rye starter made from scratch a certain way over 4-5 days then in the bread it goes. Joe Ortiz has a starter from scratch made with some milk , water, ground cumin and Whole wheat that he used on day 4 ro make his champagne loaf
So there isn't any one answer and just about anything goes and one of the reasons why SD bread making is so varied, personally original and unique.
Happy SD Baking
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For all I know, I would say it's up to you.
Let's say that you feed 100g of starter so that the goal is to have 200g at mixing time. But you can choose the mixing time. At one extreme you can choose immediately after feeding, in which case you still just have the 100g of innoculant plus the 100g of 50/50 flour/water you fed it. This is equivalent to just using 100g of starter.
At the other extreme you can choose to mix when the starter has just passed peak, in which case you have 200g innoculant.
If you choose somewhere in between you'll have somewhere in between 100g and 200g of innoculant, and the rest will be 50/50 flour/water. Based on the time you choose, then you need to adjust your ferment time according to the the amount of innoculant you add to the mixture. Less innoculant, more time to ferment.
I wouldn't expect the yeast and bacteria to be in some altered state, doing something different from normal, between the time you feed and the time the starter peaks. They eat, emit gas and acids, they reproduce. How much gas and acids they have emitted into the starter is just a matter of how much time you've given them, and the temperature. Although if you wait a significant amount of time past when the starter has peaked, then I think the equation changes.
Possibly the theory of using a young starter is based on catching the yeast and bacteria at some heightened state of activity or right at some point in the reproductive cycle. I would expect that time to vary by temperature. I don't really know a lot about it, although I would kind of put this in the category of the fine tuning you do after you have mastered a recipe. My results vary a bit still, so I wouldn't think I'd be able to know that this made a difference.
I feed my starter and my discard separately but at the same time. After an hour or so, I use the fed discard.
That way, I can have an idea of the stage at which the fed discard is, by watching how my starter is doing.