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Comment by fransje26 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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