April 18, 2022 - 11:17pm
Different hydration
Do I have to compensate when using whole wheat flour compared to white flour in my starter?. For example I used 30 grams of starter 16 G of water and 16 G of flour. My second feeding I use 30 grams of flour and 30 grams of water. My third feeding is 60 G of flour in 60 G of water. And my last feeding is 120 g a flower and 120 g of water. If I used whole wheat, how much would it change?. Or would it?.
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Nope! You just want to treat the whole wheat like you would any other flour for your starter. In fact if you take your starter and start feeding it only whole wheat after a few feedings you will actually convert the whole thing to a whole wheat starter. Flour is food and you might find out that your whole wheat will actually give your starter a boost.
I'm a bit concerned about your feeding schedule however. In general you want to feed at least 1:1:1 so you would start with 30 grams of starter and feed it with 30g of water and 30g of flour....Then discard or feed again but this time you are already at 90g of young starter so without discarding you would feed that at least 90g flour and 90g water...this gets seriously out of hand without discarding.
For me, I build my starter to build a levain when I'm ready to bake. Using a healthy starter in the fridge my schedule looks like this-
Feed 1: 5g sourdough starter/seed from the fridge, 10g flour, 10g water
Feed 2: Take 5-7g of the starter from feed one and feed it with 60g flour, and 60g water and let that go overnight. By morning it's ready to use.
If however i needed to do more feedings or build up more I would discard and keep doing the larger feedings over time to build up strength and eventually hit the amount I needed for the bake.
Normally, you would adjust your starter's hydration even between two different white flours if one flour is stronger than another, has more or less protein, or is drier or moister than another, to achieve the same dough consistency.
The goal is to make a batch of starter that looks and behaves the same as it ferments. Different flours bind different amounts of water and that affects starters.
The same can be said about switching to flour with different ash content, with more or less bran in it, as in whole wheat or graham flour. Adjust water until you see your whole wheat starter rising and bubbling in the same way your white flour starter does.
Your whole wheat flour might be stronger or weaker than your white flour, so we do not know whether it needs more or less water.
Steve and Mariana are both right. You can carry on with your normal process and accept that you will get different (not necessarily bad) results. Or you can figure out how to get somewhat similar results using a different flour by doing some experiments. Which you want to do depends on what you are trying to achieve. What will be the inoculation (fraction of starter) in the final dough? What type of flour(s) in the main dough? Do you have an open or a rigid time frame to mature the starter and make the bread? How consistent do the results really need to be (like do you just want good bread, or the same bread)?
I will agree with Steve that your feeding plan quickly nets a whole lot of starter (for a home baker). Are you making a lot of bread at the end of that process? If not, you might want to discard and feed to get the amount to something manageable (eg - I keep about 100 gr of starter. When I bake, I use 80 gr for the bake, and feed the last 20 gr with 40 gr of flour and enough water to form a paste and let that mature for my next bake, no waste, small quantities).
First of all, I would like to thank all of you who answered my question. To answer the last question, I keep a micro starter of 30 G and keep it in a shot glass in the refrigerator. At the end of feeding for my baking, I keep out 30 G to keep in the refrigerator. It has yielded two loaves of bread. I don't make Artisan Style loaves. I prefer regular shaped bread loaves. So for me, it works out just fine, and I don't have excess starter to throw out. I bake once a week.
Sounds like you are on the right track. It works for you and that's all that really matters! I hope you find a whole wheat version of your starter that works for you as well. I think sometimes we (mostly me) like to make bread overly complicated and focus on all sorts of little details that usually don't make a huge difference to the bread we eat at the end of bake day.
Looking forward to hearing how it goes for you when you try it with whole wheat.
- Steven
In your initial post, it seemed like you ended up with 300+ grams of starter. if you use all of that (less the 30 gr you save) to make two loaves, which perhaps need ~1000 gr of additional flour and X amount of water and other stuff, then you probably will have to adjust the X amount of water in your final dough to get the dough consistency, and resulting bread texture, similar to what you are used to.
If you are replacing the flour in main bread dough also, that will really require a new recipe (or rethink of the current one). If it's just the starter, plow ahead and see what happens. If the dough seems a bit dry, add some water in 10 gram increments until the dough feels right. Letting the starter itself be more or less dry than before is not a big deal - though it will rise slower/faster/differently than before, not just because of hydration, but also because WW has different components to it than all purpose or bread flour. That's why I mentioned "open time frame" in the earlier comment.
It's been six years since I've made a loaf of sourdough bread. And I can't even remember where this recipe came from except that I've had it for a long time. Steven is right about the water to sourdough starter to flour ratio, it did seem kind of odd. I'm going to try and give it a tweak and see what happens. I'll start out with less sourdough starter and then follow the bread recipe that came with. I'm looking forward to trying whole wheat starter and experimenting to see if I can get a nice loaf.
This may be a little off topic but I was talking to my friend who is a diabetic and I told her about my sourdough starter and she wanted some, so I sent her some dried starter. I'll be interested to know how hers came out.