Could my starter have too much bacteria and not enough yeast?
Hi all,
this is my first post here and I stumbled upon a similar question a while ago, but not exactly the same.
I'm truly lost and have tried every solution I could think of, but my starter is just not producing good bread. I'm not sure how to start and how much detail to give, so I'll start from the begining and give probably more detail than is necessary (appologies in advance for the wall of text):
I started this new starter after my previous one died. I neglected it during a move and unfortunately it grew lots of mold so I had to throw it away after several years of good service and wonderful loaves. I looked at my notes for how I started this first starter and followed the same procedure, feeding it a 1:1:1 ratio of water to starter to organic rye flour for the first few weeks, and then transitioning it to 50/50 organic whole wheat to organic rye flour. The starter seemed to be doubling in size in about 18-24h at RT (~70-72F). I noticed it wasnt nearly as active as my old starter, so I was afraid to use it and kept feeding it for several weeks. I fed it every 24 hours, but the activity didn't improve. I followed advice from a blog post I read and tried feeding it a higher ratio of flour & water to starter (1:2:2), and that seemed to make things worse (which makes sense in retrospect, the culture wasn't active enough to get through a 1:1:1 feeding, why would more food fix the problem?), so I went back to a 1:1:1 but then decided to keep it at a higher temp. I remmebered my old apartment kitchen was often very warm, typically between 75-80F in the summer, and stayed warm in the winter because it had so much direct sunlight. My new kitchen, being nestled between woods and with no direct sunlight because of how many trees we have outside, is typically the coldest spot in our house. So I set up my brod and taylor to 80F and started putting my starter in there directly after every feeding. This improved the doubling time, and in about a week my starter seemed to start doubling after ~12h instead of 18-24h, so I became hopeful, but the bread it produced was still bad. It had the quality of overproofed bread (poor gluten structure, very hard to handle after bulk fermentation), even though it had never truly risen past 20-30% (I tried bulk fermenting at ~70F, 75F, and 80F). So I started feeding it at its peak points, which resulted in feeding it 2x per day, and eventually 3x per day. The starter was still not getting past doubled in size, it would at most double and then fall, but it was definitely rising more quickly. This is where I am now, I've been trying the Overnight Country Blonde recipe by Ken Forkish because it fits my work schedule the best and I use a bowl with volumetric measurements, which I place in front of a camera set to record a timelapse with a picture every minute. The dough is simply not doubling. The highest amount of rise I'm getting is ~40%, at which point the dough has been bulk fermenting for the recommended 12-15 hours, but has the feel of over-fermented dough, can't pass a windowpane test, and looks over fermented after baking. My only conclusion at this point is that the starter I have has too much bacteria (thus producing acid and breaking down the gluten network), and not enough yeast (not rising enough).
My theories for how I got here are based on my limited knowledge of bacteria and yeast. I'm a chemist and work as a chemist, so I like chemistry stuff way too much, but my knowledge of biology is very limited and I feel like I'm just guessing at this point. My local water has chloramine, at my previous apartment I had a reverse osmosis system to filter my water and was then re-mineralizing it (I did this because I have a very expensive espresso machine that I'd like to preserve in good condition, so I had to reduce the amount of calcium in the water and I also liked to experiment with how different water hardness impacted coffee extraction). I was inadvertently using very good water for that starter. For my current starter I've been using water from the fridge filter, which apparently filters any lead (shouldnt be any anyway), but doesn't really get rid of chloramine or chlorine, which my local tap water does have (I looked at a city water report). Could I have somehow selectivelly killed yeast while keeping bacteria alive? I'm honestly driving myself insane thinking about this 24/7. Someone more knowledgeable than me, please help?
but I recently rescued my starter from being too acidic and like you, the dough was falling apart after bulk and I was getting bricks instead of my usual bread.
Long story short, I think you need to increase the frequency and the size of your feeds. Feed once your starter has peaked. This means when it is no longer domed and the top goes flat or concave. Don’t wait any longer as by then your starter is starving and producing acid.
Long story: I normally store my starter in the fridge so I took it out and started feeding it 2 to 3 times a day depending on when it peaked. Note I said peaked, not doubled. I also discarded everything but a few grams each time and fed it 1:4 or so. This was to dilute the acid and restore the yeast/bacteria balance. The feeds were mostly white bread flour with a touch of wholegrain flour. I kept this up for two weeks. Near the end of the two weeks, I increased the amount of wholegrain flour for the feeds. And then it went back in the fridge.
Now my routine is to make sure I give the starter a good stir at least once a week and when I feed it, it goes directly back in the fridge without any counter time.
I take a bit out when I’m am going to bake and do builds until I have enough for my recipe.
Hope this helps.
Dannii3ll3, like I told Phaz below, I think my starter is actually not getting through all the food I'm feeding it, even though I only feed it a 1:1:1, so I'm going to try the stirr first, and then start feeding it as often as possible if the stirr doesnt result in any more rising. Thanks for your help.
When the starter falls, give it a really good stirring and see what happens. If it rises again, it has more than enough food. If it doesn't, it needs food. This will help determine a feed schedule and concentrate the starter ie make it stronger.
As a chemist, you would know how chlorine and/or chloramine (and other oxidants) work, and would be able to do the math that can determine the effect of residual chlorine etc levels on a large mass of organic material, ie a starter. For the laymen, what effect would an extremely small amount of an oxidant have on a very large amount of oxidizable material, if that make sense! The effect should be negligible. Enjoy!
Thanks for your reply and help.
My innitial guesstimate was that the amount of chloramine should be negligible, but after looking through my notes for my last starter and this one, I couldnt find any differences other than the water I was feeding it.
I read a bunch of posts on here that were super helpful (all now bookmarked), and decided to stirr instead of feeding it last night. Right now, I feed it a 1:1:1 at 7am and at 7pm, it's usually doubled by then but no more. I've let it go for longer to see if it would keep rising but it just fell. Anyway, last night I stirred it and within 3 hours it had doubled again.
One of the posts I read here (linked here) mentions a few different things to try for increasing yeast:LAB. I've decided to try only one at a time. After my starter stops doubling with a stirr, I'll try decreasing hydration to see if that helps. Do you think that's a good idea? or should I transition it to white flour instead? I've dealt with a white flour starter in the past and it didn't seem as resilient as the rye/ww one I had, so that's why I'm reluctant to transition it.
The residual is usually in the few ppm range - i had to get epa certification in a past life relating to the subject. Whatever is there will be gone real fast, and it'll take out mostly flour as the starter is roughly 80% flour (very rough estimate based on the accepted norm for starter maintenance). Will it kill bugs, sure, all of them, hardly.
Having been here during like 10 yrs or more, can't remember! I've seen every which way to "increase" the critters, there aren't many good ones. Those that do help increase concentrations somewhere between a little to a little more, that's about it.
Doing this is so incredibly easy, and so obvious, but I've only heard it a couple 3 times, maybe. Here's the thing, most come here for advice or to try and learn. Without knowledge the subject, namely fundamentals, what everybody says must be the way to go. It works for most, must work for me. And now we have an accepted norm. Nothing wrong with that, it works and fortunately bread is really hard to mess up, really hard.
Recipes are based on processes that follow the norm, changing the norm now changes all the recipes. Oh what fun!
I'll close with, I'll never tell, and if by chance you find it, keep it to yourself! It'll save a lot of grief!
Oops, forgot your last paragraph! Whatever ya use in your starter doesn't really matter, how ya maintain it does. Would ya believe my starters regularly get olive oil, salt, sometimes yeast, oats, wild berries (makes an incredible starter), corn meal, i think I've even tossed in some pasta that fell off my plate, no big issues. Enjoy!
I have some thoughts on this, but first I need to know if your 1:1:1 starter formula is based on weight or volume. You mention that your loaves are put together with a volumetric bowl, so I am wondering if that is the same for your starter.
I do everything by weight, but I keep track of volume during bulk fermentation to have an accurate %rise.
You are on the right track. As mentioned above, try to give your starter a stir every so often while you are waiting for the peak. Since your starter isn't 100% white flour, you may not have the strength to get the 3-4x expansion. Stirring will help develop the strength as well as redistribute the food.
As to the bread, you may need some extra stretch and folds compared to the instructions. I have to go back and look at the recipe to be sure though.
How much starter are you maintaining?
going to knock it down and it had to start all over again?
I'm maintaining 60g at the 1:1:1 ratio (I keep 20g, feed it 10g of whole wheat, 10g of rye, and 20g of water). (Edited bc I wrote flour twice)
I actually saved some discard to start a spinoff of this starter at 1:5:5 and at 1:3:3. After excessive amounts of reading and some looking back at my old notes, I started to hypothesize that my starter isn't rising bread quickly enough because whatever selection of yeast I have in there isn't "fast" yeast, because I'm basically adapting my environment to make sure as many yeast as possible survive. This might be inacurate (I didn't read it anywhere, it's just my own thought), but I thought perhaps I should start to be more selective about which strains of yeast I keep alive. By feeding and discarding very often, I'm thining down the overall population of yeast, but the yeast that manage to reproduce in that short span of time would be the "fast" strains of yeast. So after a few weeks of this hopefully I would have a starter that is comprised primarily of "fast" yeast. However, since I don't intend to feed and discard every 5h, I'm testing this theory by feeding my starters a 1:3:3 and a 1:5:5 once a day. This should dilute the population but also, in theory, the fast yeast will have reproduced more times with the greater availability of food, thus leading to a greater population of fast yeast over time.
Feel free to call out flaws in my logic :) I don't really know what I'm doing so I appreciate all the help I can get!
The ratio thing. The first number is your starter, the second is flour and the last is water. So 1:3:2. Would be one part starter, three parts flour and 2 parts water. So 10 g starter, 30 g flour and 20 g water. Your 1:1:1 up there is not what you describe right after.
Please note that some people invert the flour and water so that the second number is water and the last is flour. There doesn’t seem to be a rule about this.
Perhaps my explanation was unclear. The 1:1:1 starter I maintain has 20g of starter : 20g of water : 20g of flour
the flour is a mix of 50% whole wheat and 50% rye, hence 10g of whole wheat and 10g of rye.
I am also maintaining a 1:3:3 (10g of starter : 30g of water : 30g of flour) and a 1:5:5 (10g of starter : 50g of water : 50g flour).
That makes more sense to me.