Dave Miller's method for semi dehydrated starter storage
Just wanted to write to say how well Dave Miller's method of starter maintenance with a semi-dehydrated stage is working for me. Learnt about the method from a forum post here that referred to this web page.
Basically I just take a small amount of starter (typically 12-13g) and rub it between my fingers in the flour that I feed the starter with (60-65g for me) until there are harder crumbs within the flour. Then the crumbs are kept buried in the flour in a water tight container in the fridge. I collect pesto bottles and small honey or mustard jars for the fridge storage.
So far it has worked out very well for me. I need to revive the starter a day earlier than if I was feeding every day, there is that minor inconvenience, but now it has enabled me to keep three different starters (Desem, my regular rye starter and now a more sour starter; and it helps with keeping them distinct as they're not being fed at the same time). Another inconvenience is that I sieve out the hardened chunks and hydrate those first for an hour or two before adding in the flour they were buried in.
The revived starter comes back with good strength and vigour, think the article mentioned that Dave Miller does it this way as a reliability thing.
Have successfully revived a 4 month old jar from the fridge, but no reason why it couldn't be much longer than that so long as the containers used are waterproof and I guess kept refrigerated.
Good to know this works for you. It is interesting to see you have four starters! Have you done any controlled (insofar as this is possible for us) experiments making the same bread with two of your starters? I've also been curious about his stepped 25%, 50% and 75% inoculation, but haven't tried it.
Joh I’ve read discussions about this type of storage for starters when one won’t be baking for some time and I was thinking about doing something like this prior to my vacation later this week. Hopefully when I return from vacation my starter can easily be revived.
Interesting that you are doing it as part of your regular starter maintenance.
Benny
Thanks for this. I'll probably do this as I'm taking a break from starter-based baking. Helpful!
Since you're taking a break from starters it then inevitably begs the question if you keep a jar of yeast water, David?
I haven't tried yeast water yet. Do you have good experiences with it?
I just copped out and bought some SAF instant yeast to give myself a break and make it easier to play with some more aesthetic breads.
Yeast water is pretty easy, David. You've got to like the lack of sour, which I do.
It's as easy as dropping a few organic raisins in a jar of water and leaving it in the fridge. Mine is always in the fridge.
Lasts for weeks and months in the fridge, but if old a double preferment may need to be built with it to make bread rather than a single preferment.
No daily feedings required, much easier than sourdough, but mystifyingly less popular. I guess because there is something even easier called instant yeast!
-Jon
Thanks Jon. I'll have to give it a try for sure. I tend to go through concentrated fixations on a particular ingredient or technique so I'll probably get into YW after my instant yeast compulsion is finished :)
This comment inspired me to drop a few old dates (and an apple for good measure) in a mason jar with water last week. It didn't seem to be doing much, but I tested a levain and it seems to be working. The YW breads you have posted all look fantastic. It does seem strange how little attention it gets. I haven't baked with it yet, but it sounds like it fits my preferences for whole grain bakes.
I am gone for months at a time on bike tours. I learned to always keep a very stiff dry kneadable starter in the fridge. When I come home I just do the same. I have never fed a starter regularly. The NMNF no muss no fuss works perfectly. I scoop out some ( I don’t measure) and add enough water and flour to equal what I need for my bake and stir . That’s it. I never feed more than that once to get a levain ready. Always works. When I’m gone for two months I just do the same. I also regularly use several starters in a bread. I keep two currently one white and one eye and my YW. Lately I’ve been using some of each in every bake. I am pretty lazy about it all 😳
Caroline, I've worked out that a YW together with levain seems to work better if I make a YW build or preferment rather than using just the liquid YW.
Do you experience that as well?
Interesting to hear about your stiff starter for months at a time, that makes perfect sense.
-Jon
I usually keep a YW and white flour starter and I also keep a rye. I then use 1/2 of each of those and about 150g or so of my YW itself in place of part of the regular water. I leave nothing to chance LOL ! Seems to work . I have used only YW and you do have to be a very warm bulk to get it to really go. YW depends on heat for sure. I have also just used a YW levain and had great luck as well. I am a hodge podge baker !!
Thanks for sharing your experience; I'm going to try it. How time consuming is it to sift out the crumbs on bake day?
In my mind this is an extreme variation of the desem storage method, which is to store your starter in its own flour. That can in various ways consist of storing your super-firm starter in a bunch of flour in your basement or wine cellar or barn (old days), within a jar of flour in your fridge (modern). Or for the lazy-boy method, simply coating the super firm ball in a bit of flour in a jar. The super-firm starter is slow to ferment, and the flour keeps it from oxidizing. Miller's method takes the stiffness even further, to the point of not even holding together into a ball.
The negative of the traditional method is that the ball slowly oxidizes in the fridge, leaving less and less good to use. Having said that, I recently revived some stiff balls that had been in the back of my fridge for about a year; so in the end for the weekend baker I'm not sure how much advantage there is with crumbs versus a stiff ball. And of course there's starter "chips" many of us have used as insurance policies.
Miller's method also reminds me a bit of how they used to do rye in Eastern Europe / Russia, where the sour is allowed to dry out almost completely in the wooden mixing troughs before next week's bake. This then gets reconstituted as you bake the following week.
The Italian biga also comes to mind, formed by rubbing between the fingers until crumbs form. But that's not meant as a storage method, so I'm reluctant to compare.
As I've been trying this method out for the week-to-week bakes, some drawbacks are emerging.
On the positive side, the final bread didn't seem any different than if I'd used my standard fridge stiff ball in a jar. It worked fine.
However the root problem for me is the amount of starter and amount and type of flour are "pre-mixed". (Notice you can't throw any flour out because the flour and crumbs are "one".) This works fine if you bake the same bread the same size each week, but creates added complexity otherwise. For instance, I have my 6g of desem in 43g of whole wheat flour, which constitutes my typical first-build (refresh) of the levain for my standard 1k weekly desem loaf. At bake time I pull out the crumbs with a fork, add 27g of water, and--voilà--my first build.
But I frequently wanted to scale the same formula differently, it creates complications compared to a simple stiff starter where it's easy to pull off what you need. I'd probably need to l label each jar so I can remember what's in it--flour and proportions--in the exact amounts.
And similarly, having the flour-and-starter as one hinders my ability to switch flours going from the chef to the levain, say from a rye seed to a wheat levain.
Now I could increase flexibility by decreasing the flour so that the jar contained 1:2 rather than 1:5. Then I could simply add "extra" flour to meet the particular formula; but I'm not sure the crumbs would even work with that little flour, let alone leaving enough to cover to protect it in storage. And if I varied from Miller and used the crumb method to simply "refresh" my storage chef to become a "ripe" or "mature" seed (rather than as the first build itself), I'd be making very small quantities (typically 5g flour +5g starter) which I'm not sure would work, though I could store it in pill bottles.
Also, aside from the extra hour each week to reconstitute, the crumbs end up quite hard and pointy, and you need to squeeze them with the water to dissolve, which is rather unpleasant aesthetically. Not a deal breaker, but I prefer the softness of the stiff ball.
So, all in all, I am not sure on the efficiency of this method used week-to-week as Miller and JJon do, compared to my usual method of a stiff starter in the fridge, a small piece of which gets elaborated into the first build and then the final levain. Miller is making a 100 loaves; I'm making one or two.
That said, I can see the method being valuable for long term storage. But the comparison would be between the crumbs-in-flour vs dehydrated chips where you add flour later-- and I'm not sure which method works best for that purpose. The chips take up a lot less space of course.
This is interesting. I never thought of this as a "method," it's just what intuitively made sense to me when I wanted to greatly slow down a starter's activity.
When I travel with starter, I mix a teaspoon or so with enough flour to dry it out fairly well and put it in a small bag. That way I don't have to worry about feeding it for days until I'm ready to use it--a bonus is as far as airport security is concerned it's not a liquid, nor will it spill or leak in my luggage no matter what. This is how I brought my current heirloom starter home in the first place from a relative's house thousands of miles away, via a road trip and a six hour flight, and made great bread with it the next day after one feeding.
This is a great idea for those people want to keep starter but only want to use it occasionally. It sure beats regularly feeding a starter you aren't using and throwing away flour every week. I wish more people just used their heads instead of mindlessly following instructions... For instance I only need a few grams of starter per loaf a few times a week (I like to let rise overnight), and I don't need to feed it beforehand, so that's how much I keep in the fridge at any one time and that's what I don't do before adding it to my dough--I haven't tried many "sourdough discard" recipes because I don't really ever discard.
The reason I like to use starter for everything is precisely because it's so simple and easy. Yet some people want to make it so complicated.