June 4, 2018 - 11:46am
Newbie here - so all starters are different??
Reading about Camaldoli, Ischia, King Arther and San Fransisco starters.
I made mine with Stop and Shop flour and tap water (filtered and boiled to reduce chlorine), what should I call mine - "Cheapo" ? ?
So I get that where you start the process would pick up microbes in the local air, but then once its moved (from Italy to my house) and I start feeding it MY water, MY air and MY flour does'nt it change?
Do you just find your favorite and keep it going? Do you keep several starters and use each based on what your baking? If I prefer more yeast taste rather than sour taste - whats your suggestions?
THANKS!
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It is my belief that your water and flour will change the characteristics of the starter. Also most if not all of the microbes are derived from the flour and not the air. Hopefully others will either confirm this or share their knowledge.
If you want your starter to favor yeast over the LAB (the bacteria causing sour) you will need to feed it before it recedes very far. So once the starter rises (peaks) to its highest level and then just starts to recede is the best time to refresh a starter that favors yeast. Every starter has yeast and LAB. If a starter favors one the other will be lacking, proportion wise.
Tells us about your starter. How is it fed, the temperature at which it is kept, refrigerated or not, all information can be informative.
HTH
Dan
thanks - needed some reassurance that I wasn't missing out by buying 300 year old, or fancy named Italian starters.
I am very happy with my starter, its only 2 weeks old (became ripe 2 weeks ago) and I have been making breads -1 and 2 loaves a day since. I had always made only store bought yeast breads, gave starters a try and have made the best breads of my life. I actually didn't know why its called "sourdough" because mine haven't been sour. I must have kept the proportions your speak about in balance (totally by chance). I kept it in an attic bedroom at about 70 degrees (a little warmer during the day), and fed it every night at 6pm. I kinda overloaded myself and family on the bread carbs so I just put 1/2 in the fridge and dried some into flakes (just because I thought that was SO COOL- it can save for a year).
anxious to keep learning, thanks!
What ratio do you use to feed your starter? The feed ratio is typically written; 1:2:3 . Where 1 = starter, 2 = water, and 3 = flour.
Example - you use 50% starter and it is maintained @ 100% hydration. The ratio would be 1:2:2. You could use 25g starter, 50g water, and 50g flour. Or 25:50:50
Great plan to dehydrate some of your starter for a backup.
Dan
I know I will get Pooh-poohed - I am not using a scale yet
I was using or discarding half then adding 3/4 cup flour and 1/2 cup water, so I believe 1:2:2.
Yeah, I have a lot to learn.........
turns out that my flour is VERY light, and what seemed like a LOT of flour wasn't even 1:1 with my starter!
For a time I was eyeballing and just making a thick paste. It's easy to eyeball a good feed and consistency.
However just for argument sake 3/4 cup flour to 1/2 cup water is far less than 1:1.
1 cup flour to 1/2 cup water is closer.
No bread snobs here. But I don’t think you’ll find a single person on this site that regretted getting a scale. Before you buy anything else for bread baking, I suggest you get a scale. You’ll be glad you did :D
A cup of water is 237 grams (8 oz). So a 1/2 cup of water is 119 grams. The weights of a cup of flour varies quite a bit, but let’s call it 120 grams. So, since you are mixing 3/4 cup of flour, we’ll call it 90 grams.
If my math is correct (someone please check me out) your starter hydration is 132%. I figured this in my head so hopefully I got it right. That is pretty wet.
Looks like your ratio in grams is 105:119:90
A cup of water is very close to twice the weight as a cup of flour.
Dan
120g for a cup of flour sounds right.
120g x .75 = 90g
236/7g x 0.5 = 118g
118 / 90 x 100 = 131 ish %
I concur Dan
Emily Litella, SNL in the 70's ( you have to be 50+ to understand)
I got A LOT to learn!
Baker’s math seems complicated to most people at first. I know I struggled to grasp it. But like most things, once you get it, it make common sense and is really pretty simple.
Once a baker learns a few simple rules the math becomes second nature. A simple formula written in Baker’s Math tells us so much information in only a few lines.
If you or any other readers of this post are interested to learn, you can find all the help needed on this forum.
Dan
I am taking it seriously and got a scale.
Got a whole lot of questions too.....
What about chlorine in tap water for starter feeding? I have been boiling for 10 min, that necessary?
Feed 2-1-1 when its everyday on your counter and you want it ready to go at any time? And feed that same ratio once a week when its in the refrigerator? Can you work on a system where its always in the refrigerator and take out daily what you need the night before?
I have been proofing on parchment paper then an easy transfer to oven and baked with parchment paper - any disadvantages with parchment paper? proofing baskets with a towel at bottom - does'nt the towel wick moisture from the dough?
(and I made sure to get a scale with grams and Oz's - but its going to get all confusing when I will question if its weight or liquid ounces)!!
I use boiled water from the kettle that has been cooled.
For future reference when you see a feeding ratio of 1:2:2 (for example) it's starter:water:flour. To save confusion.
If you're feeding it on the counter it may be difficult to keep on top of it if you aren't baking everyday. Unless you feed it 1:5:5 (for example) and it's not too hot then you might find yourself feeding it every few hours. So refrigeration is the way to go.
A popular way is to keep a starter as a seed only and make preferments aka levains. This is where you take a little from the starter and preferment part of the recipe (make an off-shoot starter if you will). This way you only need to keep a little amount of starter and re-feed when it runs low. So I keep around 50-80g starter (this does vary depending on how much I find I'm using) in the fridge. Everytime I wish to bake i'll take a few grams off and build a levain. When my starter runs low 10-20g then i'll take it out, give it some TLC and then return it to the fridge. This way there's no discard and I'm not slave to my starter.
Prove in which ever way works for you and you're getting the best results.
Stick to grams. 1ml water = 1g.
The scale will raise your ingredient accuracy. I’ll let others comment on your starter and refrigeration. My starter is kept at room temps.
The very best way to portion ingredients is by grams. I’m from the US so ounces are familiar to me. But grams break down into much smaller units. 28 grams = 1 ounce. You will quickly adjust if you are not used to grams already. Portions go by weight and not volume.
A good example of weight would be salt. It is common to use 10 grams or so of salt. 10g salt = 7.8% of 1 ounce. It’s easy to see that 10g would be easier to weight out than 7.8% of an ounce.
Dan
Salt.
Unless one has those special scales salt can be difficult to weight. So on a normal kitchen scale it's best not to zero out before weighing the salt. Just put the container on the scale and add however much salt on top of that weight.
So if one needs 10g salt then weigh the container and then pour enough salt in so it goes up by 10g.
If one tares it out then the first few grams of salt might not even register.
.. but my calculator says:
1 Ounce = 28.34952 gms (not 128 gms) ;-)
rudi
Great catch, Rudi! Thanks for correcting.
I edited the post in question.
Dan
I'm thinking in grams! ;-)))
Happy baking
rudi
We heard Dan's opinion on your own flour changing the original starter.
What about others? Did everyone make there own starter, have you ever bought Italian or 300 year old starters? where they different?
TAHNKS!
which is now about 7 years old, is that it stays remarkably stable. It was begun in South Africa in 2010 and was fed with locally available flours there. It followed me home to the U.S. in late 2011 and has been fed an array of flours here. Flavor, odor, and leavening power are the same across the years; at least so far as I am able to perceive them.
It is likely that the population within the starter has fluctuated in terms of the species and strains of bacteria and yeasts. However, on a macro scale, the starter seems to be pretty much what it has always been. It hasn't gotten stronger or milder in flavor or fragrance. Nor is it faster or slower to raise the dough.
I'm of the opinion that unless there is a major upset in conditions, a healthy starter will stay consistent no matter what it is fed. It is a well-tuned mini-environment that is hospitable to the organisms already growing there and hostile to interlopers.
Paul
appreciate yours and every opinion, but can you clarify your belief - you still would call your starter "South African"?
Did you buy it or make it yourself?
The starter is one that I made myself, while I was living in South Africa. Whether that makes it South African, I really don't know. It seems to be a bit of a fiction to call it something like that when there isn't a defined set of traits. We aren't comparing Rhodesian Ridgebacks to German Shepherds, after all.
It certainly isn't the same starter as it was then, simply because that was who-knows-how-many generations ago at the microscopic level. The macro traits remain very much like they were then.
I would simply refer to it as the starter that I built while I was in South Africa.
Paul
I’m thinking... Knowlegde is great, but experience trumps knowledge. At least that is my present opinion.
Not long ago it was commonly believed that the microbes in a new starter were derived from the air. We were instructed to cover the starter’s container with a breathable fabric (or something similar) so that the yeast in the air would populate our culture. Today it is commonly accepted that the microbes are mainly derived for the flour used to feed the starter. It is now recommended as a best practice to use organic whole grain because it contains more viable microbes.
But I started to wonder what my actual experience was with various starters. In the last 6 months I have worked with 3 very different starters. One that I made, another from a prominent baker that lives in Florida, and a third that came from Teresa Greenway @ Northwest Sourdough. I got the 2 other starters in order to compare them to mine. I wanted to compare the flavor profile and also the lifting power (yeast). Obviously the test was not scientific. The only measure of flavor differences was my palate. I think I have a fairly discerning palate. The differences in the flavor of breads produced with the various starters were barely noticeable, if noticeable at all. Once, during testing, I got 2 of the starters mixed up (didn’t know which one was which) and could not tell from the taste which one was which. Since I always backup any new starter, I was able to throw those 2 out and rehydrate the backups.
QUESTION; had I maintained the identical environment and fed them with the same foods and water as the original owners would the flavors varied? I think Puratos does exactly that.
The characteristic that was very noticeable was each starter’s ability to raise (yeast) the dough. The rise of the starters and also the time need to fully rise in the feeding containers varied.
But with that said, I believe if I went to Puratos Sourdough Library and was able to taste breads made from different starters, my experience would be quite different. But that is what I believe. Not what I know.
So, I read what I wrote above and conclude this. From my LIMITED experience the flavor produced by various starters have not been appreciably different. But there are many starters I know nothing about. It is probable that certain starters have quite different flavors. - - - I don’t know what I don’t know. - - -
But this I know. I am able to greatly change flavor profiles of bread using my common starter. It doesn’t have a name. I suppose I could call it the Thibodaux, La. Starter, but if the microbes come from the flour, maybe it would best be named the formerly King Arthur Starter and now the Morbread Starter.
By using different flours and/or grain, different temperature, various hydration, or changing up the length of fermentation for either the starter, Levain, dough, or any combination I can produce breads that are wildly different.
I look forward to hearing the opinions and experiences of others. I am eager to learn the things I don’t know :D
Dan
“blessed are those that experiment and share the results with others”
... this will answer some questions!
And there the map and the results!
But for every answer I have two new questions!
Kind regards!
rudi
The very first one I ever created was so acidic that the resulting bread was dill-pickle-sour, minus the dill flavor; not exactly what I was looking for in a whole wheat bread. Given what I know now, I might have been able to turn it in a different direction but I was entirely clueless at the time and just chucked it.
It is possible to tune the bread flavor by what we do during fermentation, allowing one starter to produce a range of flavors. Influences include temperature, hydration, flours, and time. In the case of a 3-stage Detmolder process, temperature and time are crucial to producing the intended result.
Given the above, I think the question about a starter's ability to retain its original makeup in the face of changing conditions is moot. Maybe they do, maybe they don't. I still think that a healthy starter's population of yeast and bacteria will maintain itself, even in the face of changing food sources. If nothing else, there are simply too many of them in the starter compared to the numbers in the flour which gives them the upper hand. That's also why I think that when there are differences between two starters, it probably has more to do with the microflora that successfully colonized those starters at the beginning.
I suppose that if you switched from feeding a starter rye flour to feeding it amaranth flour or cornmeal, then you might see changes simply because some organisms thrive on one of those foods but not so much on another. That's why I'm in the habit of feeding my starter a combination of whole rye, whole wheat, and bread flour. Those are the flours that I bake with most, so the starter organisms are already geared to metabolizing those flours.
Paul
So......the more I am reading and from MY understanding (and again, I am new to this), bacteria fights off invading bacteria and our starters are yeast and bacteria, right? So a starter that has original Italian or San Fransisco or African bacteria could keep its original characteristics if its keeping its original bacteria??
I think yes. From everything I read it is the bacteria that is mainly responsible for flavor.
Dan