Sourdough Starters.

[Whisky]

I did a search and the only threads I can find on starters are about 6 years old. Figured it was time for a new one.

For those of you who keep starters where did you get yours? Do you keep it in the fridge or on the counter? How often and how much do you feed it? Do you keep your starter at a more doughy consistency or runny? What’s your favorite thing to make with the starter?

My starter came from a friend who got hers from the King Arthur flour mill (she grew up in New England) I’ve had my starter for about 6 years now but the King Arthur starter is supposedly over 100yrs old. Mine splits time between the fridge and the counter depending on how much I plan to use it that week. It gets fed about once a week, 5oz by weight water and All Purpose flour. My starter is kept at a “runny dough” consistency, it will pour but very slowly. While I like sourdough bread, sourdough waffles are my favorite.

 

[paintflinger]

My opinion on starters is that age doesn't matter. the yeast is replaced by whatever is on the flour and typically not what's in the air.

As far as storage goes I keep it in the fridge typically however I have left out on the counter plenty of times. In the fridge I can usually go about a week to two weeks without feeding it and it bounces back immediately. On the counter it's about three to four days maximum that I can go without feeding it. The rise is definitely better if you fed it for a couple days before making bread.

 

[Whisky]

My opinion on starters is that age doesn't matter. the yeast is replaced by whatever is on the flour and typically not what's in the air

I agree. The age thing is just kind of cool. I know a couple of people who brought back starters from SanFrancisco and were disappointed when after a month or so they couldn’t reproduce the flavor. When I tried to explain to them that the yeast is pretty quickly replaced with “local” varieties they looked at me like I was a moron.

 

[Ted A]

I started mine in May 2016 using the instructions in In Search of the Perfect Loaf by Samuel Fromartz. I keep it in the refrigerator until a couple of days before I plan to bake Then feed it twice a day. I bake about once a week. I usually feed about 50 grams of flour and the same weight or slightly less water. Flour is half bread flour and half whole grain. That may be whole wheat, rye or spelt.

 

[Alacrity59]

I'm making a couple of loves of sourdough a week. There is a Bread thread where I've posted some of my more recent loaves. It is a really is a hard thing to do from text instructions . . . and I really do think even with YouTube mostly folk are too fiddly. I tried making starter on and off for over a year. In retrospect I had success many times but didn't know it.

I do think your local yeast takes over whatever you may have started with so my advice is just go for it. I also think that once you have the Liquor forming you are there. The starter does not have to look active to make a good loaf . . . I think that is where I went wrong . . . it would be active and then fall back before I saw it being active. Then I'd add more flour and water and make pancakes with the excess . . . but sadly some got poured down the drain.

I was doing some pretty good bread but maintaining the starter was, in retrospect, nutz. This guy changed the whole game for me.

 

[Avi]

Ours is a pandemic baby so almost a year old or so, based on the King Arthur recipe.

We make bread about 2 3 times a week and it’s a great few minute distraction throughout the day working from home.

 

[Tirvine]

Mine began as nice organic flour and chlorine free water. It is about fifteen years old now. I try to use it and feed it weekly, but it has been left for close to a month before and bounced right back. The texture is barely thin enough to stir with a fork. Now and then it gets a little whole wheat or rye but is basically KA AP and bread flour. When I feed it, I often add a little turbinado sugar to amp it up. In addition to boules and baguettes it makes great pizza dough and English muffins. It sits on the counter to be fed but goes back in the fridge once it calms down.

 

[Ad Astra]

Got one off ebay a year ago, but. It was like a goldfish, got tired of feeding it... Now you can buy yeast again.


AA

 

[eelhc]

After a year of experimenting.... Here's what I settled on. I work extremely hard at being lazy. My thinking is that the gold rush miners probably didn't fuss much over baking bread.
Starter stays in the fridge anywhere from 3 days to 2 weeks. 150-200g in a mason jar with pickling top.

• The day I'm baking bread, I start around 8AM.
• Mix the dry ingredients by weight (80% bread flour, 20% whole wheat flour, 2~3% kosher salt, ~1% diastatic malt powder).
• Take the starter out, move ~5g to a new jar, feed in 1:2:2 (10g rye/bread flour mix, 10g water) and set aside.
• Pour water in old jar with the remaining starter (75% hydration), mix/shake well to get all the starter (helps with cleanup too).
• pour the starter/water mix into the dry ingredients (depending on the size of the mason jar and the size/number of loaves baking, may need to fill the jar a couple of time).
• incorporate all the ingredients and cover the shaggy mass, set aside for a couple of hours.
• 10AM. Take the dough out of the mixing bowl, stretch/fold/shape into a tight ball. Put back in the bowl, cover and set aside for a couple of hours.
• 12AM. Repeat stretch/fold/shape, put back in the bowl, cover and set aside for 4~6Hrs (until the dough doubles).
• 4~6PM. Stretch/fold/shape, into a prepared banneton, cover and set aside until proofed (finger test).
• 6~8PM. Retard in the fridge for an hour or two (mostly just to firm up so it doesn't deflate when scored).
• 9~10PM. Bake.
• Before bedtime. Feed the starter in the new jar 1:2:2 and put away in the fridge.

Looks like a lot but it's probably around 30~45 min of actual work altogether to bake some loaves and feed the starter. Mostly just waiting.

I don't bother with feeding the starter and waiting for it to mature before I start. I only stretch and fold a couple of times and I don't retard overnight. By shaping the dough tight each time I do the stretch/fold, I am trapping and keeping the co2 bubbles inside. It's a one day, 14Hr process (with less than hour of any real work). I kind of take the approach that I do with barbecue. There's a window I'm shooting for but it's ready when it's ready. i can keep an eye on the dough and maybe move it to a warmer spot in the house to hurry along. If I get a later start, I may use lukewarm water to hydrate. ~100g of starter may not seem enough to bake a couple of loaves, but the exponential growth of yeast is helping me. I don't really need to watch it much until the end of the process and for bigger/more loaves, I only need to let the yeast work an hour or two more.

I used this technique as a starting point. I get more consistent results than the overnight no knead methods.

 

[CurtisB81]

I like the old dough method, it’s easier then a starter..Just save a golf ball size of dough from a batch and add it to the next batch..

 

[Multum in parvo]

That’s the domaine of SWMBO but I know that in our fridge we give home to a rye and a wheat starter. Rye is used for bread, wheat is mostly for pizza crusts. Feeding time is every 10 days and we started them from scratch which took 4 days.

It’s a runny, bubbly affair but in the halcyon days of summer vacations we dried them up with enough flour to make them crumbly. In this state they survived 2-3 weeks.

 

[johnb65]

I just use a piece of dough saved from the previous loaf and only feed it if I don't bake for a long time.

 

[Old Hippie]

My mother was a microbiologist with special research interests in fermentation and dairy. OF COURSE we ate sourdough everything when I was a kid. Leaving home at 17 I got a pint of sourdough starter, some old towels, and some other stuff. Almost 45 years later I still have one of the towels...

But I've had a lotta sourdough starters over the years. Then I met my wife, who has been doing sourdough as long as I have and brought her own starters to the marriage. Gotta love blended families.

At present we have two starters parked in the fridge. One is a white flour starter, the other is all-rye. I pull them out every week or so if we're not using them much and refresh them. Mainly we use them for bread, though I often will save the starter I dump out for a refresh and make pancakes with it the next morning. Gotta do that more often with the rye; the white starter gets used every week for the monster loaf that feeds us.

We also do a lot of fermentations. Among our dairy ferments are both yogurt and skyr. We strain/drain them both to thicken them up, and save the whey to use in the bread as well. They bring additional flavour but also lactobacilli up the yingyang and additional protein. Makes the bread rise well. I particularly like the skyr whey for that -- it's a different mix of lactobacilli and smells a bit like butter.

I also use skyr as the culture for butter. Stir a tablespoon of skyr into a quart of cream, let it sit out for a couple-three days until it starts smelling good, then churn it. The buttermilk gets used in the bread occasionally, but I'm more likely to use it in a curry or just make a batch of sawmill gravy to go with biscuits and pork chops. Buttermilk in the bread makes the loaf smell like a gigantic stick of butter!

I've gotten starters three ways: steal one, start one with baker's yeast, and start naturally. Probably the house is now filled with locally-adapted strains of yeast after all these years of baking, fermenting and brewing.

They do get "tired" or mutate off the main track. Sometimes that's good, other times it's icky. Starting a new one is simple, but it takes some use before it starts to balance itself out.

O.H.

 

[eelhc]

My mother was a microbiologist with special research interests in fermentation and dairy. OF COURSE we ate sourdough everything when I was a kid. Leaving home at 17 I got a pint of sourdough starter, some old towels, and some other stuff. Almost 45 years later I still have one of the towels...

But I've had a lotta sourdough starters over the years. Then I met my wife, who has been doing sourdough as long as I have and brought her own starters to the marriage. Gotta love blended families.

At present we have two starters parked in the fridge. One is a white flour starter, the other is all-rye. I pull them out every week or so if we're not using them much and refresh them. Mainly we use them for bread, though I often will save the starter I dump out for a refresh and make pancakes with it the next morning. Gotta do that more often with the rye; the white starter gets used every week for the monster loaf that feeds us.

We also do a lot of fermentations. Among our dairy ferments are both yogurt and skyr. We strain/drain them both to thicken them up, and save the whey to use in the bread as well. They bring additional flavour but also lactobacilli up the yingyang and additional protein. Makes the bread rise well. I particularly like the skyr whey for that -- it's a different mix of lactobacilli and smells a bit like butter.

I also use skyr as the culture for butter. Stir a tablespoon of skyr into a quart of cream, let it sit out for a couple-three days until it starts smelling good, then churn it. The buttermilk gets used in the bread occasionally, but I'm more likely to use it in a curry or just make a batch of sawmill gravy to go with biscuits and pork chops. Buttermilk in the bread makes the loaf smell like a gigantic stick of butter!

I've gotten starters three ways: steal one, start one with baker's yeast, and start naturally. Probably the house is now filled with locally-adapted strains of yeast after all these years of baking, fermenting and brewing.

They do get "tired" or mutate off the main track. Sometimes that's good, other times it's icky. Starting a new one is simple, but it takes some use before it starts to balance itself out.

O.H.

So..... have you got Kombucha and Jun SCOBYs as well? How about Kefir grains?

 

[kelbro]

I bought some starter from a bakery in SF while I was working in the Bay Area. 17-18 yrs ago, I think. Used it in TX, AZ and now NC. Keep probably 50-80g in a pint mason jar with the lid left a little loose. Stays in the fridge until the night before I plan to bake. I add 80-90g of room-temp spring water and the same weight of flour. Most often it's APF but sometimes I mix in some WW. It pretty much doubles overnight sitting on the counter. I dump most of that in my water/flour mix with a little salt and put the jar back in the fridge until next week. I've gone three weeks between bakes several time and probably 4 or 5 weeks once or twice. Starters are pretty robust. My bread tastes about the same as it ever did. Different flours, different waters. Must still have something or another from the original yeasties/bacteria.

 

[Old Hippie]

So..... have you got Kombucha and Jun SCOBYs as well? How about Kefir grains?

Nope. Sufficiently tea-phobic that mouldy tea just sounds gross.

But what DO we ferment? Lessee, here...two kinds sourdough, fermented pickles, sauerkraut, kimchi, fermented ketchup, fermented tomato paste, yogurt, skyr, butter & buttermilk, cheese, wine, beer, mead, tempeh, miso, dosas, curtido, sausage, pancetta, guanciale, lardo. There must be more; that's a really short-looking list. But let's just say that fermentation happens.

O.H.

 

[eelhc]

Nope. Sufficiently tea-phobic that mouldy tea just sounds gross.

But what DO we ferment? Lessee, here...two kinds sourdough, fermented pickles, sauerkraut, kimchi, fermented ketchup, fermented tomato paste, yogurt, skyr, butter & buttermilk, cheese, wine, beer, mead, tempeh, miso, dosas, curtido, sausage, pancetta, guanciale, lardo. There must be more; that's a really short-looking list. But let's just say that fermentation happens.

O.H.

I'm getting "regular" just reading this.

 

[Alacrity59]

Man . . . let's head over to Mr. Natural's place for a good nosh.