Comment by jillesvangurp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jillesvangurp | Hacker News Reader

Using the right flour is something to use to your advantage if you are doing sourdoughs. One obvious thing from this article - not all flours actually contain gluten - has an implication for how you evaluate your starters. If you are looking for your starter to double in size, which is something world + dog insists on in online recipes, you need a flour that contains gluten.

Flours like rye or whole wheat don't have a lot of gluten relative to white flour. And there are a whole lot of online recipes recommending specifically those flours for feeding your starter. When you bake with such flours, you get a denser bread and when you create a starter with them, you'll struggle to get them to double in size for the same reason. They'll ferment and bake just fine. But there's just a whole lot less gluten to hold the starter together. Of course there's a wide variety of flours and milling techniques that determine how much gluten is actually in each flour. It's entirely possible to have whole wheat with lots of gluten. Rye has less of it but still some. It all depends.

I tend to use rye and whole wheat for flavoring. I baked a 75% spelt, 20% whole wheat and 5% rye flour bread last week. Very tasty. And I got a good over rise out of it (using a Dutch oven, which I highly recommend). My starter is the bastard offspring of whatever I had around to feed it for the past seven years. I started it off on regular white flour from the super market. What you'd call all purpose flour in the US, I guess. And since then I feed it with whatever I have around. When I don't use it, it lives in my fridge. For months on end. It ends up looking really sad. But then you feed it and it bounces right back. After observing that it was struggling to double in size with whole wheat or rye flour a few years ago, I now feed it with spelt flour. Which seems to work well. It's a German 1050 variety. Which means it's high in protein and gluten.

I don't struggle to get rye starter to double in size. I don't know why. Maybe something else is at play here, not gluten. But, really, it works well (at least for the doubling in size part).

I use two starters, one fed with all-purpose flour and another one with rye flour. The difference I can see is that the rye one takes noticeably longer to "deflate". I.e. if I don't use the all-purpose flour starter right about after 4 hours, it'll start dropping back to its original size and in maybe 4-6 hours will have almost the same volume it started with. With rye starter the process takes more than a day. Also, for the same proportion of water / flour, the rye one feels noticeably thicker.

BTW, I buy rye flour from a Polish supermarket. Local chain supermarkets only have all-purpose and whole-wheat flours and occasionally the "00" (pizza) flour.

> When you bake with such flours, you get a denser bread and when you create a starter with them, you'll struggle to get them to double in size for the same reason.

Sharing my personal experience: I use a 100% rye starter (wholemeal or, preferably, German type 1150 [1]) and my starter grows ~2-2.5x in volume. Gluten has an impact but is less important when you proof in a small container (same reason you would bake a high hydration rye bread in a tin). What is a lot more important is that a) the hydration is right, so the starter is not too liquid (in my case a bit less than 100%), and b) you feed the starter in a ratio of 1:3 old:new, or even 1:5.

[1] https://www.hefe-und-mehr.de/en/2014/03/mehl/

What's the obsession with having your starter double in size? I haven't heard about it before.

I'm feeding my starter by weight, so that I can take the same amount out when I bake, and the volume of growth really doesn't come into play.. I mix in whatever I have, mostly rye and spelt, sometimes wholegrain wheat, but it hardly ever doubles in volume and the bread comes out fine at the end of the process.

If you have a nice range of bubbles sizes forming in your newly mixed starter, you'll be fine.

It's a measure of how alive/acive your starter is. If you know what you are doing, you can indeed just wing it and judge things by feel, touch, and smell, etc. But you do need to know what you are doing to be able to do that.

Weighing things out indeed helps and I do that too because it makes things easier. But it's worth noting that people have been baking bread for millennia without access to any hyper precise measuring devices or flour milling and sieving techniques.

I would add that it's a measure in particular how active the yeast is in your starter culture, and yeast is the crucial ingredient for fermentation.

Rye starter might not double in size, and that's fine. In fact, mine usually go through a period of hyper-growth 2-3 days after they are initiated, but that is not when they are ready: if I make bread then, it comes out overly sour/acidic. I learned to wait another 4-5 days until the starter stabilizes and stops growing like crazy, which gives me a better balance of bacteria and fungi.

Mind you, this is with a starter based on while rye flour. So, a side note: HN is predominantly US, and for some reason everybody in the US seems to think whole rye flour is only good for making pumpernickel. None of the bread-baking books I saw listed this simple recipe: 350g whole rye flour, 250g wheat flour, around 500ml water, 10g salt, 50g starter, let grow for 8h, bake at 210C for 1h10.

No kneading, no fuss, bread for busy people, and extremely tasty at that. But you do need good quality whole rye flour.

My brown rice flour starter doubles in size. I think gluten ones triple? Doubling isn’t so hot

> Flours like rye or whole wheat don't have a lot of gluten relative to white flour

I think you mean Bread Flour specifically, as opposed to the All Purpose Flour that most people associate with white.

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