Where is everyone getting all of this sourdough starter?
vice.com
vice.com
The article acknowledges you can get it from the air but raises two objections: it takes five days to do so and a new sourdough starter doesn't have the full classic sourdough taste.
Ok? It still makes bread work.
It's a little sad to see a reporter using FUD to obscure one of the ingredient sources that literally can't be hoarded, and pushing people toward visiting their local pizza shops or whatever instead of staying in isolation.
Exactly, yeast is the original opensource technology.
That’s likely why organic flour is better for starting, as it’s got less in the way of microorganism inhibitors.
EDIT: @ChuckMcM has answered this below.
This is big misconception, most of the yeast comes from flour itself.
Which is why when making your starter you want to use unbleached and/or whole grain flour.
Is there science on this? My March 2nd starter is plenty flavorful and pungent. You throw away (or find another use for) virtually all of it daily, so it seems an odd claim; after a couple days the original starter cells are basically at homeopathic levels of concentration.
The taste of the starters comes from whatever you feed it and environmental conditions.
Personally, I’ve tried sourdough a couple of times, never gotten the starters to really work (despite having done tons of other bread). I’m trying it again now, but I’m kickstarting the starter with pickle brine (not vinegar, the actual lactic fermented brine). There’s some bacterial activity, but it’s too soon to tell if it’s going to work.
But in the meantime, I’ve got a yeast starter going from my last commercial yeast, because I’m out of yeast and so was the store. It’s been going a week now, and it’s working reasonably well, and even getting a bit sour, with none of the problems of weak rising that you can get from a more pure sourdough culture.
having a few jars that you cycle through every feeding removes the funky crusty buildup that tends to happen if you reuse the same jar.
If I decide to give it another go I’ll definitely do that. Good idea.
Worst case, you can augment your rise by combining your starter with a portion of industrial yeast when baking. You get the best of both worlds. Flavor from the starter. Rise from industrial yeast.
The flavors are pretty surprisingly similar but not exactly the same. The older one is a little more complex or something but I'm not sure most people would know the difference, especially if you didn't tell them.
Once a levain/starter gets going it's usually pretty stable I think. Maybe older cultures are more resistant to prolonged shocks, but I think it depends on the case. In general I have a theory that older cultures are an opportunity to evolve them to different conditions, like time between changes in storage conditions (which might affect things like rising time), alcohol levels (useful for sugar levels in breads), temperature, etc.
Creating a starter: https://www.kingarthurflour.com/blog/2012/04/05/creating-you...
Maintaining a starter: https://www.kingarthurflour.com/blog/2012/04/08/maintaining-...
and the remainder of the starter-specific articles under the tag https://www.kingarthurflour.com/blog/tag/sourdough-starter
Anyone starting out should also try a no-knead preparation. The NY Times's recipe is famous: https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/11376-no-knead-bread
If you have a large enough dutch oven with a lid, those trap steam and you don't have to have a tray of water in the oven.
It's written in a way that really appeals to my analytical mind, and it took me only a couple tries to wind up with really amazing bread.
[1] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bvgbk8/people-all-over-th...
I would have assumed that the answer is people are leaving flour and water out (and I'm sort of thinking of doing so, myself), so I'm surprised that the conclusion of this article is that they're actually getting it from somewhere. My goal isn't to make the tastiest sourdough, my goal is to have bread at home without leaving the house. (And I don't have any yeast.)
Flour meal naturally contains a lot of yeast and bacteria.
If you are bored you can do the same thing we did which is to take your ingredients and make loaves from different people's sourdough starter. All the same ingredients except for the starter and experience that for yourself.
I had a funny experience of exactly this recently.
I got a starter from a friend a year ago and have been feeding it and using it regularly since. But recently, my father had some health issues and I had to go live with my parents for a couple weeks to help out, back in the small rural town they live in. I took my starter with me, and made a couple loafs of bread for my parents, feeding while I was living with them.
But when I got home, my starter was different. I grows way faster now. It's much more active. It seems to generate a lot more CO2 than before.
I suspect during my visit, my starter picked up a new strain of yeast which has joined the ecosystem in my jar. And it's made for some great bread.
My ability to remain in ketosis is apparently indirectly proportional to the availability of delicious fresh sourdough bread.
Everything should be measured in grams for ease of use.
When baking bread, everything is done using the bakers percentage. All this means is that all ingredients are measured in relation to the total amount of flour being used. If you’re using 100g of flour, then at 75% hydration you add 75g of water. Note that to be super precise when you get more experienced, you want to include the amount of flour and water in the starter used in the loaf, but when getting started it doesn’t matter.
Use bread flour specifically. All purpose flour doesn’t seem to have what the yeast and lactobacilli need. It can grow, but the resulting starter is weak and prone to getting mold infections easier.
For a period of a week, each day mix an equal amount of flour and water by weight. I always use 100g of water and 100g of flour. This is considered 50% hydration.
On each day, throw out 90% of the mixture from the previous day. You aren’t wasting anything. The flour from the day before has been eaten up.
Weigh the remaining starter (20g in this example). Then weigh out 90g of water and 90g of flour. Mix all of these together.
One thing I’m trying to get across is maintaining a consistent total weight, 200g in this example.
After 5-7 days of repeating this process, you will have a healthy starter culture where the predominant microorganism culture is wild yeast and lactobacilli. These two work together symbiotically. The yeast eat the flour and excrete things the lactobacilli eat. In return, the LB excrete lactic acid which gives the bread the sour taste and works to suppress other bacteria and molds from growing.
Use and maintenance:
Once you have a healthy starter, you change the ratio of water to flour when feeding it.
When baking, you generally want a starter that is 75-80% hydration vs the 50% used during initially growing it. All this means is that after baking for the day or if you’re just feeding the starter daily to maintain it, you take the 10% of yesterday’s starter and add it to a mix of 100g of flour and 75g of water.
I always bake my sourdough at 75% hydration and maintain the starter at the same ratio. It makes the math easier and the bread comes out fine.
After a lot of experimentation I eventually locked in a recipe that has my specific amounts, so I don’t have to do the math every time.
If anyone wants my bread recipe, leave a comment here and I’ll add it later. Don’t have my book in front of me right now.
>I always use 100g of water and 100g of flour. This is considered 50% hydration.
Well, which is it? :)
> When baking, you generally want a starter that is 75-80% hydration vs the 50% used during initially growing it. All this means is that after baking for the day or if you’re just feeding the starter daily to maintain it, you take the 10% of yesterday’s starter and add it to a mix of 100g of flour and 75g of water.
I’m describing two different parts of the process. 50% hydration is for growing the starter from scratch. 75% is for maintenance and baking.
Edit: Nevermind, just saw your correction!
> For a period of a week, each day mix an equal amount of flour and water by weight. I always use 100g of water and 100g of flour. This is considered 50% hydration.
I meant to say this is 100% hydration (when water and flour are equal parts).
https://twitter.com/shoelaces3/status/1244252079041974272
> Scour your kitchen for any dried fruit: grapes, raisins, prunes, apricots. Fresh fruit works too, but it's best to leave it unwashed, and given our current situation this is probably not a wise thing to do unless you've grown the fruit yourself and trust it.
> Take your fruit (or, if using fresh fruit skins--please use your judgmenet), pop it into a jar, and add a little bit of water to it. 2 or 3 tablespoons (30-40 mL) is more than enough. If you stir the fruit around, you'll notice the water gets slightly cloudy. That's the yeast!
However, I don't think the yeast will remain that old as we feed it with flour which has it's own yeast culture so eventually everything gets mixed up.
Seemed like something you can do with simple ingredients and time, and well I've got lots of time to feed a starter twice a day. It actually is growing well.
We'll have to see if it works well once it is made into bread.
Why would you kickstart a yeast (fungus) culture by giving it competing organisms (bacterial cultures) from yogurt?