New Starter In Two Days - Wow!
Here's a brand new starter I made in two days using old pickle brine. I've been wanting to try this for months. I have a jar with some pickling brine left over from salt-fermenting summer corn (also known as "maize" in some parts outside the US) a year ago and I thought it might be perfect for creating a new starter. Here's the background.
Salt-fermenting pickles is much like creating a starter. At the start the brine is not acidic and certain microbes start to grow. There is a progression of increasing acidity favoring different organisms until finally the pH is low enough that only a few lactic acid bacteria can thrive. As time goes on, salt and acid penetrate the foodstuffs and the pickling progresses.
Sounds like the progression a new starter goes through, doesn't it? As Debra Winks and her associates learned, the dormant yeast in a new starter culture does not come to life until the pH gets low enough, around 4.1. She recommends using pineapple juice as the initial liquid, which apparently provides just the right amount of acidity.
If you don't know about Debra's work, read this link:
https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/10856/pineapple-juice-solution-part-1
It's not clear to me which kinds of acidic liquid are favorable for jump-starting a starter. But I thought that a highly acidic liquid with lots of LAB should be good. The only potential problem was that it would have a high salt content, but that would get watered down as the new starter got fed.
So I tried it, with astounding results. The initial pH of the brine was 3.5, nice and low. Here's my log:
============= Tom's Log for Brined Starter =============
- 9 AM Saturday - Initial mix. pH = 4.05. Hydration 100%.
- 11 PM Saturday - stir. pH 4.1-
- 9 AM Sunday - looks inert. pH 4.05
- 2 PM - some small bubbles visible through the side.
- 5 PM - quite a few more bubbles. Stirred.
- 11:30 PM - more bubbles breaking surface. pH: 4.05.
after refresh (no discard) with 20g bread flour, 20g water, pH: 4.35.
- 7 AM Monday - Has risen about double. pH: 4.39. Bubbles are smaller than
I often see with my main starter by this point but it looked slightly
collapsed. So it probably needs to get fed. There is a faint aroma
that I don't recognize. It may just be the pickling brine, I can't tell.
- 7:05 AM - discard all but 15 - 20g (eyeballed), feed with 40g each of water
and bread flour.
- 11:45 AM - risen about 2 1/2, very gassy. Ready to use. Looks like my
regular starter.
- 11:50 - mix up a basic dough for a test loaf.
========================================
Just two days after creating this starter I thought it seemed ready. So I discarded most of it and fed it enough to make the starter for a smallish loaf - 300g of flour. This was to be a pretty standard loaf, to be proofed free-standing and baked with steam as I usually do. The flours were 20% graham flour, 80% Gold Medal all-purpose. Hydration including the starter was 71%, and probably increased because of the water I misted my hands with during handling and stretching. Daytime temperature was 77 deg F, nighttime was 73 deg F.
The pH of the dough was 5.5, much higher than my usual sourdough. It didn't come down during fermentation. I supposed that means there isn't much LAB yet, and I expected that the flavor would be pretty mild because of it. Well, heck, people, it's only been two days. Let's allow the starter continue to age and mature!
The dough acted normally except that it seemed unusually sticky and extensible. This could have been because of the low acidity. It also took longer to ferment than I expected: doubling in 7 hours of bulk at 77 deg F. The free-standing proof only took an hour, though. I worked hard to build in enough strength so that the loaf would not slump and spread too much during proof.
I baked with initial steam following my normal practice. Here's what I got. It looks just like similar loaves I bake using my familiar, everyday starter. Actually, the crumb is a little more open than many of my similar loaves.
All right, we've got a lovely-looking loaf with a great crust, but how's its flavor? Very good, actually. It doesn't have the depth or savory aspect that I usually get from similar loaves, but it's much better than a straight yeasted loaf. There's no tang at all, not that I usually get much with this kind of bread. It's probably more like what you'd get from a poolish. I'm fairly sure that the pH will drop as the starter ages, and that more of those lactic acid notes will show up.
The moral of the story is to start out a new culture with an acidic liquid like pineapple juice - you don't have to make pickles first! (I'm pretty sure that the low pH of the brine allowed the short time of two days. Pineapple juice will likely take longer). Note that I did not use any whole wheat, rye, rye bran, or anything else besides white roller-milled malted (US) flour. And read the post I linked to above, and the part 2 post it in turn links to.
That's a neat demonstration, Tom. Will you keep the starter for a while to see how it behaves over a longer period?
Paul
Yes, that's my plan. Its acidity is already increasing, and I just did a normal refresh (no added salt) and after about 4 hours it had practically quadrupled and looked amazingly healthy.
At no time in those two short days did I smell any odors, offputting or not, until at the point when I used it to make that first loaf of bread it had a faint smell I couldn't quite identify but might have been a faint trace of the original pickle brine (bear in mind that my smelling apparatus isn't very sensitive).
I haven't tried out pineapple juice for creating a starter, but after this experiment I would never create another one without acidifying it to begin with. Debra Wink's group found that vinegar is bad though. Apparently it somehow inhibits the yeast development.
Pickle brine is one I don't think I've tried, although I did get yeast growing on day 2, as you did here, when I acidified the initial flour-water mix to pH 3.5 with citric acid. Doesn't take much more than a tiny pinch since citric is so strong, but the newborn starter didn't seem as robust as others I had going alongside it, and I didn't continue feeding to see if or how long it would take to get there. Seems like yours took a few feeds to get going as well? Perhaps the yeast benefit from something that sourdough-appropriate strains of LAB provide, and those aren't established so soon. But that's only a theory based on N=2, yours and mine ;-) The bread looks great!
Good to hear from you, Debra! After the two days had passed, I thought the new starter looked like a normal starter that needed to be refreshed, so I refreshed it in the morning and was baking with it in the afternoon.
I did hope that the LAB in the pickle brine would be helpful but like you I wasn't sure. The brine was saltier than we think of for a starter but I knew it would be getting diluted.
The brine had a pH of 3.5 and the initial mix of flour and brine was at 4.05. So I was hopeful for a quick response, keeping in mind your empirical pH threshold of 4.1 for waking up the dormant yeast.
Since then I've been feeding the starter along side my regular one and they always look nearly identical. I just baked a loaf with it yesterday and it came out just fine.
BTW, I don't know if you picked up on it in my posts but I've taken to salting my everyday starter. It stays out on the counter all day and night so I want it to last at least overnight. The combination of bread flour instead of AP, a slightly lower hydration (90 - 95%) and 1% salt makes that work. In fact, the starter won't max out until around 12 hours and will be in reasonable shape for 24, when I will feed it again.
I tested salt in starters some time ago, and up to 2% seemed to have no effect except of course for slowing down the development. 4% seemed to start suppressing the LAB, judging form the taste of the bread. 6% drove the LAB down to near zero over a span of several weeks. The bread came out so flat-tasting! That's how I came to use 1%.
TomP
Salt is a useful tool in the sourdough toolbox :-) I'm playing with temperature and hydration right now to zero in on keeping a whole wheat starter mild. The Sourdough Home is proving good for that.
... keeping in mind your empirical pH threshold of 4.1 for waking up the dormant yeast.
I've always said less than 4 because that's what it's been for me. Closer to 3.5 sometimes. Even in the flower experiment the pH dropped below 4 the day they started expanding (test and control). But given the variety of possible yeasts, consider it more of a blurry line than a sharp one.