The Sourdough Starter Topic

[cookman]

I've recently found a recipe for a starter that seems less involved than others I've seen, and I'm willing to give it a try. However, it calls for 2.5C flour, 1.5C water 1 Tbsp. sugar and 3/4 ounce yeast to start, fed with 1C flour and 0.5C water every "few" days for a "few" weeks if its refrigerated. Then you can go down to once per week.

You might be interested to read this recent article from Peter Reinhart in the NY Times on how to make a starter: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/11/magazine/11food-recipe3.html?emc=eta1

[andiesenji]

And there are many that include the boiled potato and potato water with flour.

One of the Cornell sourdough cultures was started this way and kept going for many years. I have one of the Cornell publications from the late '50s that describes the process in excruciating detail.

I never use commercial yeast in sourdough - don't see any point to it.

However, I have purchased sourdough cultures from http://sourdo.com/culture.htm and I have Ed Wood's books.

I have been very pleased with all the starters I have tried.

[rickster]

However, I have purchased sourdough cultures from http://sourdo.com/culture.htm and I have Ed Wood's books.

I have been very pleased with all the starters I have tried.

I highly recommend these as well. I've tried the French and Italian cultures and would not go back to trying to start my own culture from scratch.

[rooftop1000]

I am going on a limb to say this is a sourdough product...This umm "bread product" was yeasted with the dregs of a homebrewed Wheat beer. I have no idea if it was over yeasted, over proofed or over hydrated but when I went to turn it out for shaping it sort of poured out. After 10 seconds of thought I dumped it onto a cormeal dusted cokie sheet and hit it with olive oil and flaked salt. Voila Focaccia. A little on the funky side with all that yeast and malt flavors, but I have decided even my worst homemade bread is better than store bought

tracey

Edited October 26, 2009 by rooftop1000 (log)

[maui420]

greetings all,

i have a noob question. ordering sourdough culture online that is supposedly taken from exotic places, after a few generations of feeding, wont that culture become filled with local yeasts and eventually lose its original yeasties?

[andiesenji]

greetings all,

i have a noob question. ordering sourdough culture online that is supposedly taken from exotic places, after a few generations of feeding, wont that culture become filled with local yeasts and eventually lose its original yeasties?

It will if you leave the container open to the air for more than a brief period but it still takes a while.

I have maintained four distinctly different starters from sourdo international for quite some time but I take care to keep them completely separate - that is, I allow some time to elapse between using the different ones and I keep the "mother" cultures as isolated from each other as possible.

I use Cambro containers which seal tightly for the larger batches that I use often and use glass quart canning jars for the smaller batches.

[OliverB]

So, I finally decided to get back into bread baking, and as I love sourdough bread (and live just a bit west of San Francisco) I decided to start out with a San Francisco Sourdough culture I obrained from sourdo.com, a site run by Ed Wood, who seems to know a whole lot of things about all things sourdough from all over the world. I have a couple other of his cultures too, as well as some from Germany. I shall play with those at a later time.

I'll also eventually post a more detailed thing about this adventure on my blog, with lots more photos, but that will develop from what I'm going to chronicle here for the next week or two, until my first loaf hopefully comes out utterly fantastic

Just as a note, I am not a baker. I bake up to 10 kinds of Christmas cookies once a year, I make the occasional pizza, sometimes from scrap, and I've baked two or 3 breads as well as the Bavarian pretzels that are currently my avatar. So this might turn into a disaster or into some beginners luck, or maybe the instructions in the pamphlet as well as Ed Wood's book "classic sourdoughs" are good enough to carry me through to a fantastic loaf of bread. We'll see. (disclaimer, I don't know nor am I affiliated with Ed Wood and I found the e-mail conversations about my order and it's status a bit off putting - just putting text form the website in BIG FAT BOLD letters in not the most friendly reply I can imagine, but I ain't there to cuddle, just to shop and hopefully create something tasty, so it's all good)

So, as I just signed up for the new round of no shopping for a week or longer I figured I better get this culture reactivated and started, if I want to have some bread in a couple days.

Their cultures are dried and dormant, containing some kind of wild yeast and lacto bacteria from some area of the world. Some of them very esoteric, possibly dating back centuries if not thousands of years, others like the SF one just a bit over 100 or so years old. Certainly a very interesting project Mr Wood started there.

I won't repeat the entire instructions here for copyright reasons and if you are interested and order cultures from them you'll get them anyway, but the first step in awakening the dormant culture is to put the dry culture in a quart mason jar, mix it with flour and warm water and then put that up for about 24 hours at about 90 degree. The book suggests to buy a cheap Styrofoam cooler and install a 25 W lightbulb with dimmer in the bottom, which will become the top. I don't have room for such a contraptions, so I just used my large plastic cooler, put a pot inside and clipped a small lamp with a dimmer on that. My bbq meat thermometer kept track of the temp, which was surprisingly easy to keep at 90 degree.

After 24 hours the mixture had begun to bubble a bit, I turned the lamp off and a while later I added one cup of flour and less than 3/4 of warm water, to maintain the same consistency as before. Of course I forgot to take a photo of the mixture after 24 hours, a friend came by to drop off her little one for playdate with my little one and I got distracted....

The mixture looked like a dough, off white, bubbly. It had separated a bit, there were places that had a layer of brownish liquid in it. At this early stage it is possible that contaminations in the flour create some weird lab experiment and there are instructions on how to "wash" the culture if it should go bad. The main indication for contamination is said to be an "unpleasant odor". Well, one man's stink is an other man's ultra expensive smuggled into the country super ripe French cheese, so I'm just hoping that the not at all unpleasant but pretty sour and yoghurt or buttermilk like smell seemed ok to me. Supposedly the relatively high heat at the beginning helps the lactobacilli grow faster than the yeast, something that then has to be slowed down or they'll just inhibit the yeast from growing.

We'll, that's where I'm at right now, I took a couple of pictures which I'll add soon and hopefully I won't forget to take pictures at crucial steps again. I will have to feed my culture again with a cup of flour and water in about 12 hours (which will be more than 14, poor planning on my side and I'm not gonna get up at 3 am to feed a dough) which will repeat for an other couple days. I'll eventually divide the culture into two glasses, feeding both of them and eventually discarding all but about 1 cup in each glass. This appears to help evening out the yeast/lacto ratio. Once the culture grows by about two inches within 2 or 3 hours of feeding it's ready to be used in baking or you can put it in the fridge, where it can live for a long time. They suggest to feed every two months or so, but supposedly it'll be fine for 6 months too, just requires more work to reactivate it fully. This is actually the first surprising thing I learned, I thought you have to feed such a culture constantly, my dad, who's first profession was a miller since he grew up on a very large mill in Bavaria told me stories of women keeping the sourdough culture close to their bosom in their dress to keep it nice and warm. As I neither have the necessary equipment nor would I have the patience to do so, I never thought I could tackle sourdough bread. The fact that I can have this in the fridge for months and just occasionally - with some pre planning - can make a loaf of bread, that's a big reason for me to go on this adventure. I love great breads, but we don't eat all that much, certainly not a loaf a day, more a loaf a week. I'm hoping that I'll be able to scale things so that I bake a small loaf we'll eat the day it was baked and I can make an other one a couple days down the road if needed.

Feel free to chime in here if you bake sourdough breads, if you have experience with Ed Wood's book and cultures or if you just started your own by mixing flour with water and letting it sit outside for a couple days. (Something I'll be trying too one of these days)

Fun experiment so far, and I did not yet burn the house down with my lamp in a cooler - off to a good start!

[OliverB]

just a mini update, the culture seems to come along nicely, it's divided into two glasses now and grows into a nice bubbly foamy thing over it's 12 hour time between feedings. I think I'll be baking this week!

[LRunkle]

Am considering trying sourdough bread and was going to send off to King Arthur's for some of their starter. Will I be able to freeze backup starter or do I have to keep it going actively or at least reefrigerated?

[chiantiglace]

yes, but not recommended. its very easy to star your own.

[Special K]

http://www.kingarthurflour.com/tips/sourdough-primer.html

". . . unlike children or pets . . ."

[Joe Blowe]

Drying would be better: http://www.carlsfriends.org/OTbrochure.html

BTW, that site is a worthwhile read for anyone interested in sourdough.

P.S. You can score starter there for the cost of two postage stamps

[slkinsey]

The short answer is: it depends. It depends on how you do it, how long you plan to keep it frozen, and whether the strain appears to be freeze-tolerant. The famous "Carl's Starter" from back in the rec.food.sourdough days has apparently evolved to be quite freeze tolerant, provided that you follow the same freezing procedures. I think drying before freezing is recommended, as water crystallization may not be so great for the microorganisms.

By the way, if you are going to acquire an already-established sourdough culture, I'd recommend Sourdoughs International over King Arthur. This is something I very much recommend over starting your own culture. Self-started cultures take a while to evolve stability, are notoriously cranky, and may not turn out to be all that great when all is said and done. Sourdough baking is tricky enough on its own, so why not use a culture with known properties?

[chiantiglace]

Sourdough baking is tricky enough on its own, so why not use a culture with known properties?

Unless the yeast strain is wild, the properties are going to be the same eventually no matter where the starter came from. I suggest starting th sourdough with one of your favorite fruits. Try grapes. I have used potatoes, onions, pears, all stone fruits practically, and various other things to start my sourdough in the past. That can give you a really unique flavor. But once in a while you may end up finding yourself adding purchased yeast to the mix to get it going again, so you will just end up diluting the starter and it will always end up your personal one, whether you like it or not.

[LRunkle]

Thanks a lot for the replies. The link to http://www.sourdo.com/ was particularly interesting. I will try my hand soon.

[boudin noir]

I recently decided to venture into the world of sourdough. I wanted to use a wild yeast starter. Following directions I found on the web I mixed 1oz of water with 1 oz of flour. Mixed. Day 2 I mixed. Day 3 added same amounts of flour and water. A few bubbles. Day 4 more bubbles, fed it again. Day 5 and 6 still more bubbles and fed each day. Day 7 fewer bubbles, texture thinning, fed again. Added a small amount of dried yeast. Day 8 tried to make bread. Did not rise. What happened?

[avaserfi]

A healthy sourdough starter can take a couple weeks to really get going. It sounds like you had some activity, but the starter still needs some nurturing before you can really bake with it. From what I have read, bacterial growth occurs first creating the environment wild yeast need. Eventually, a balance between the wild yeast and bacteria is reached and the starter is ready to work. Of course, the baker can control this balance to some extent through feeding intervals, hydration, flour and other additives.

I would also avoid adding dry yeast to the starter, there is no purpose. Instead encourage the growth of wild yeast and bacteria by feeding regularly. Once it is healthy you can store the starter in the fridge between uses, just make sure to feed it once or twice before trying to bake with it. In my experience, once a starter doubles in size four hours after a feeding it is pretty healthy. A very healthy one will quadruple in size in the same time.

I also suggest you read this post on sourdough starters by Peter Reinhart. It discusses one potential issue with making a starter that plagued me when I first made mine a few years ago. In the end, the problem is just a bump in the road, but it is good to know about because it can slow the growth of your real starter as you culture an unwanted bacteria which masquerades as yeast. Eventually, the bacteria kills itself allowing for the proper microbial growth, but it can add a couple weeks to your process.

[boudin noir]

I read peter reinharts post. He seems to descrbe what happened to my starter pretty accurately. Thanks.

[Karri]

Hi all, I have a problem and I was hoping someone could help me.

So, I've been attempting to make a sourdough starter. The recipe I got for it from a Spanish baker's -named Xavier Barriga -book, and it gives strict instructions to this:

Step 1 cut up two apples and remove seeds, place in airtight container with 25g of honey and cover with mineral water. Store at 35 - 40 degrees celsius for 5 days.

Step 2. Strain and mix in 100g of "harina integral", in english I believe it's unprocessed flour. Store this in airtight container at 35 - 40C for 48 hours.

Step 3. Weigh 100g of this mix and mix in 300g of warm mineral water and 300g of "harina de fuerza" I think it's bread flour in English, 12g of protein/100g. Store again airtight but at 30C for 24 hours.

Step 4. Weigh 150g of this and stir with 250g water and 250g of flour as before. 24 hours, 28 degrees

Step 5. 150g mix 300g water, 300g flour, 6 hours 28 degrees and it should be ready.

My problem is this. The starter is very wet. It's the consistency of very wet and sticky porridge. And when I try to make bread with it, the bread won't rise at all. It just turns sour. The starter itself just creates these tiny bubbles that have the same color as soap bubbles...

Can someone please offer guidance or a better recipe? Thank you!

[Panaderia Canadiense]

Harina Integral in English is actually Whole Wheat flour, and Harina de Fuerza is probably best translated as high-gluten flour. Regular bread flour has less gluten in it than Fuerza does.

I've always had excellent luck with a potato, boiled and then riced, left in a standard bread flour sponge (1C water, 2C flour) on the counter, in my little stone crock which has an ill-fitting lid. It sours in about 3 days and provides a lovely rise.

[Zacky]

Add a slice of rhubarb to the starter? Essentially - you are trying to capture the wild yeast bacteria that live in the environment, so don't go around spraying everything with "Kills 99% of all known bacteria" sprays! Temperature, enough flour for the bacteria to feed off and the right amount of water are all key - as is patience! Good luck.

[Karri]

Thank you very much for the translations! I'll try the potato because it's too hot here to grow rhubarb.

[pkeibel]

My sourdough is stored in a crock. It is not airtight. Not sure but if its airtight how are the yeast to grow?

[gfweb]

Harina Integral in English is actually Whole Wheat flour, and Harina de Fuerza is probably best translated as high-gluten flour. Regular bread flour has less gluten in it than Fuerza does.

I've always had excellent luck with a potato, boiled and then riced, left in a standard bread flour sponge (1C water, 2C flour) on the counter, in my little stone crock which has an ill-fitting lid. It sours in about 3 days and provides a lovely rise.

Isn't boiling the potato defeating the purpose? Or is the potato just yeast-chow?

[qrn]

Hi all, I have a problem and I was hoping someone could help me.

So, I've been attempting to make a sourdough starter. The recipe I got for it from a Spanish baker's -named Xavier Barriga -book, and it gives strict instructions to this:

Step 1 cut up two apples and remove seeds, place in airtight container with 25g of honey and cover with mineral water. Store at 35 - 40 degrees celsius for 5 days.

Step 2. Strain and mix in 100g of "harina integral", in english I believe it's unprocessed flour. Store this in airtight container at 35 - 40C for 48 hours.

Step 3. Weigh 100g of this mix and mix in 300g of warm mineral water and 300g of "harina de fuerza" I think it's bread flour in English, 12g of protein/100g. Store again airtight but at 30C for 24 hours.

Step 4. Weigh 150g of this and stir with 250g water and 250g of flour as before. 24 hours, 28 degrees

Step 5. 150g mix 300g water, 300g flour, 6 hours 28 degrees and it should be ready.

My problem is this. The starter is very wet. It's the consistency of very wet and sticky porridge. And when I try to make bread with it, the bread won't rise at all. It just turns sour. The starter itself just creates these tiny bubbles that have the same color as soap bubbles...

Can someone please offer guidance or a better recipe? Thank you!

try here, good folks,,http://groups.google.com/group/rec.food.sourdough/topics