Enjoy! Looking forward to seeing some lovely sourdoughs.
See here for Jeffery Hamelman’s Rye Starter Maintenance. Of course there’s no one correct way and you must find your own method for your needs but it’s a good insight for ideas. What I will say is while a starter can survive in the fridge for long periods of time for a healthy and tasty starter it’s best to give it some TLC at least once a week.
Thanks for the fascinating Hamelman post, Abe. Because I only bake every 10-14 days and prefer not to discard, my usual method is to keep only a very small amount, a couple Tablespoons, of starter in the refrigerator and feed it the amount that I’ll be taking out for my next bake the day beforehand. It has always seemed pretty active to me and has raised many a loaf, but then I have nothing to compare it with. It would be interesting to do a Melissa-style side-by-side bake with one loaf using a daily fed starter and other with my usual starter and compare the results.
I’ll be very interested to know your results, Wendy. I’m thinking you’ll find the one fed daily will have more depth of flavour. Of course when baking every 10-14 days feeding daily is not ideal for your own schedule but you can find a compromise. Something like once a week on a Sunday give it a feed otherwise store in the fridge. When it comes to baking build a levain. So on the week you bake the starter (levain going into the dough) has had two feeds in relatively close succession making it healthy and tasty all the while you haven’t been slave to your starter.
I’m glad it’s working out for you.
My starter maintenance is similar in no-discard spirit: But I bake about 2x a week, so I feed it at minimum 2x a week. And sometimes I just pull the starter out of the refrigerator and let it warm up and expand some more before using it. Even when I feed only 1x a week, I use the discard to leaven a dough of some sort.
I don’t think what you say is completely true. It would be true if the invading strain of yeast or bacteria do not thrive in an acidic environment. But if, for example, the yeast found in the white and rye flours used in the experiment are equally tolerant of that environment, or if the yeast in the rye flour is more tolerant of the environment, then the microbiome will change and evolve. But this is a slow process because of the dramatic head start that the original starter had and will take time. And while the 1:1:1 feeding procedure is perfect for baking, it is not for an experiment that requires many generations of yeast and bacteria to evolve in a way that is noticeable.
I hear what you say @SingKevin but I have some questions/points:
When we make a starter from scratch it takes a while. The starter’s pH level doesn’t drop at first and the quick off the mark bacteria often aren’t acid tolerant. That is why at first it can have some peculiar smells due to leuconostoc bacteria. When a viable starter is fed it will lower the pH level far quicker killing off any bad bacteria and the good bacteria and yeasts will multiply much quicker than any ones introduced. So why would any other bacteria or yeasts out do the established ones? After all it can take a while for good bacteria and yeasts to take hold, when making a starter from scratch, but just hours for a viable starter to multiply. Symbiosis is stability! I would think a significant change can only happen if some mistake is made and one spends days reviving a starter which amounts to making one from scratch. Wouldn’t active bacteria and yeasts out compete anything introduced for food long before they could take hold?
Here’s my first loaf with the new rye starter, it’s Melissa’s wonderful Naturally Leavened Rye and Oat Bread. I had to unintentionally modify the recipe a bit since I didn’t realize until well into it that I didn’t have enough rye berries, so I used about 100g of a soft, high protein local wheat. The flavor of this bread is exceptional and the mahogany color of the crust is gorgeous.
What you say is partially correct. To the extent there is “bad” bacteria in the rye or white flour starters or the flours subsequently added to them, they will not thrive in the acidic environment.
However, I interpreted Melissa’s experiment not being about the “bad” yeast or bacteria but about the competition between the “good” but different yeast and bacteria in the rye and white flour. In this way, when the rye flour is added to the white flour starter, it is adding both “bad” yeast and bacteria (and those do not thrive any more than they do in the 100% pure rye starter) but also “good” yeast and bacteria that presumably can thrive in the white bread flour starter. These are the yeast and bacteria that thrive in the 100% rye starter created with just the rye flour. And it is the “good” yeast and bacteria from the rye flour that is competing with the yeast and bacteria from the original white flour starter.
So in that competition the question becomes which bacteria will outcompete the other. Let’s say, very hypothetically, the ratio of white flour yeast to rye yeast after the initial addition of rye flour to the white flour starter was 999 to 1. Unless the white flour yeast and bacteria or rye yeast and bacteria have some evolutionary advantage over the other (e.g., reproduce faster, better adapted to an acidic environment, better evolved to consume rye flour, etc), I believe that ratio will stay the same through their life cycles unless change is introduced through the experiment.
So the experiment introduces change by constantly adding rye flour and thereby adding the yeast and bacteria from the rye flour. So little by little, the percentage of the yeast and bacteria from the rye flour will increase. But that will take a long time, especially if you follow the feeding schedule that is being used in this experiment.
In the absence of a serious science experiment, I do not believe true “symbiosis” as you use the term is possible. Even if you are not mixing types of flour, when you use flour (even of the same type) from different geographic locations or different years of production, you are introducing new strains of yeast and bacteria. Given time, these new strains enter the competition described above. Unless the pre-existing bacteria and yeast have some evolutionary advantage, the new yeast and bacteria will not be out computed simply because they start with with a smaller population. So a starter is continually evolving and changing, but it is at rate that is very slow. So slow that we do not notice it as a change.
It’s very late here so please excuse this quick reply. I totally understand what you are saying and I must point out that i’m no microbiologist and only explaining what i’ve come to understand. I do not fully understand the whole process certainly not everything happening under the microscope. Other things to think about is a change in a starter when feeding a different flour might also come from different taste characteristics of the flour itself. And starters have a multitude of yeast and bacteria with one dominant kind of each at any one time. Change something within a starter and others can come and take their place. So a starter itself can change but from within as well is how I understand it. And how would feeding different flours affect this change? One kind of yeast might be better able at metabolising the different sugars etc. It is a very complex process which is not fully understood yet.
P.s. I also like the idea that this process has been going for thousands of years long before anyone knew what bacteria and yeast were. And they made bread with it. I like knowing what is going on but I also love the mystery attached to it. How an inert ‘dead’ flour comes alive by just mixing it with water. When a starter is born and you make your first bread with it. Fascinating stuff. Yeast and Bacteria really rule the world. We humans are just here for the ride.
What a lovely bake @wendyk320. Looks delicious and it slices very well. Being rye it;ll also improve over the next day or two. I’ll need to try this recipe.
Yes, that is why I said in the absence of evolutionary advantages. But there inevitably are and things do become a mishmash of yeast and bacteria strains.
As much as I love the effort with this experiment, I just don’t think it provides meaningful information because of the limited duration. If anything, with apologies, I think is creates a false impression regarding its conclusions even though everything is says is true with respect to the appearance, smell of and bakes with the starters. Kind of like taking a COVID19 test the first few days after exposure. It comes back negative and you can’t argue with the test results, but they don’t mean anything because it takes longer for the virus to multiply such that it can be identified.
What do you think about heat treating the flour a starter is fed in order to kill off any bacteria or yeast? What pros and cons might there be? I’ve also heard people like to feed their starters white flour to avoid introducing microorganisms which is more abundant in wholegrain.
One last comment on this thread. When I built my new rye starter, because I keep such a small quantity of starter and because I don’t bake often, I decided to create the starter at 1/4 scale. I began the starter with 15g each of flour and water and continued my daily feeding at that level. I had a significant bacterial rise on day 3 and then not much until day 6 when there were just a few bubbles and slight rise. On day 7, the starter doubled, but it took all day. I did one final feeding on day 8 when the starter became very active and doubled quickly. I baked the Rye and Oat bread pictured the next day, so the starter worked fine in an actual loaf. As far as I can tell, scaling down worked just fine and there was minimal discard.
Yes, you could certainly try that. Or you could buy heat treated flour if you can find it. That would certainly help if you are doing something like comparing starters as above.
I am not aware of an issue using heat treated flour, but I really had never considered using it. To me, there are two very practical cons to doing this.
#1 - The likelihood that I would screw up the heating process or get frustrated by the time and planning that would be required to have heated flour ready whenever I need flour.
#2 - I feel that using sterilized flour takes some of the magic out of baking bread. I prefer to embrace the diversity of the microbiome that is my starter and the changes that nature imparts to my starter. The changes are unpredictably constant but the starter always works. That is magic.
I fully agree with you @SingKevin. This was purely from a theoretical scientific point of view, for the purpose of this thread and throwing out ideas for anyone who wishes to try it. For myself i’m more than happy to let nature do all the work. Like I said earlier…
That is a beautiful bread, and I bet the wheat flour is nice for the texture.
@ all , I’ve been feeding the two experiment starters once a week 1:1ish:1ish.
I’ll do another test bake this next week, and then I’ll crank up the ratio to 1:5:5 or more.
