Greetings from Izmir, Turkey with a question
Hello all, I've been following TFL for a long time and have learned everything I know about breadmaking, from making my own starter to kneading and baking techniques. For a long time, instead of discarding the half at each feed, I'm baking bread for myself and friends and neighbours. Today, I wanted to conduct an experiment with half of my SD starter. I know there are good recipes for potato SD starter but there are just too many of them, which causes serious confusion (and most of them include instant baker's yeast). My SD starter is 500 grams. So today I took half of the starter out, fed the starter and instead of baking bread with the other half, I mixed it with 250 grams of potato goo (I'm calling it potato goo, since it looked like a goo).
For potato goo, I boiled 1 medium size potato and added 10 grams of sugar to the water. After it was soft, I took the potato out, mashed it and put back into the potato water and mixed it well, until it became gooey. I let it rest for an hour until it was lukewarm and then took 250 grams of it and mixed with my discarded 250 grams of SD starter. Now it is waiting on my kitchen countertop and I'm hoping some sort of magic will happen out of this.
The reason I wanted to try this is, potato includes glucose, which is a simple sugar. And to my knowledge, wild yeast consumes sugar in order to produce alcohol and carbon dioxide. And since the amount of sugar in potato is quite low, I added a bit of sugar to enhance this goo.
My question is, did anyone try something similar? (I read somewhere potato based starter was used with SD starter and yielded good results). And will this work?
Thank you all in advance and may your day be savoury as a freshly baked loaf.
never tried it but have made a delicious roast potato sourdough.....gives a wonderful texture and a lovely subtle flavour. If you want to try different starters raisin yeast water is easy enough....makes a great starter for sweet breads
I've heard of potato sourdough bread but haven't heard of prepping ones starter with potato mash. I do believe the starches are beneficial for the yeasts but have only heard of adding the potato into the main dough.
This is a website with wonderful recipes... https://www.theperfectloaf.com/sourdough-with-roasted-potato-and-rosemary-potato-bread/
yeasts feed on carbohydrates and potato is a carbohydrate. Did find this:
http://lifehacker.com/5859049/make-yeast-from-potatoes
and wonder where the yeast is coming from. Your sourdough culture will adapt to the potato starches as food so there will be an reaction in time. Wait long enough and it will turn to alcohol and can be distilled into vodka. I think the sourdough beasties will do just fine without the additional sugar.
I'm guessing that to use in bread, the mixture should be used in a few hours after mixing together. goo and culture. Keep track of the flour weight used to write down and figure the recipe formula and salt amounts needed. Hydration will be tricky, I believe potato is 80% water but some of that is lost in evaporation and cooking. I find that when potatoes are used, the salt amount needs to be slightly raised. Be sure to taste your dough for salt.
Using cooked potato comes under the dough enhancing pre-cooked starch additions, like tangzhong, cooked grains and cereals, flour roux. in other words... it can be overdone. So if your finished bread comes out wet and heavy, you may want to reduce the amount of cooked potato and/or potato water in the recipe. I would expect the sourdough culture to break down the starch gelatine in the goo if given enough time just as the culture can break down gluten when fed flour.