Carl Griffith's 1847 Oregon Trail Sourdough Starter

From the FAQ: "Could local environmental organisms change the starter? Possibly. Some microbiologists did a study on how stable established strong and healthy starters are and they found that essentially, a strong starter out-competes other organisms in the environment and keeps its characteristics. This is what we have found with our starter. It continues with its characteristics since we have been providing it."

The typical changeover in a sourdough culture moving locations is about one month, assuming regular feeding. As a professional bread baker I am disappointed that this fact is often withheld/obscured by people selling portions of their starters. If there weren't significant location-based differences then, for example, the distinctive San Francisco sourdough flavor could be replicated by sourdough bakers anywhere. Likewise, Puratos—a company generally known for its manufacture and sales of baking mixes—wouldn't maintain a sourdough library, akin to the Svalbard seed vault.

The best reason to acquire an existing sourdough culture would be to start with a healthy, vibrant culture. I think the gain is minimal, both in time and labor. And the person who will typically have a lasting interest in sourdough bread baking is someone who is drawn to the whole process and not after that type of shortcut, especially during the initial learning stages.

I think the idea would be that you only use small portions of the starter, not the whole thing. I'm familiar with keeping yeast cultures for brewing and this seems to be the technique if you are keeping live cultures.

Get your sample, split it up, and keep track of the generations.

Ken Forkish says basically this in Flour Salt Yeast, but I also assume it is relatively well known among the more empirically-minded bakers. In any case the flavors developed in the bread will have much more to do with both the hydration of the dough and the temperature it rises at (as I understand it these will affect the balance of acetic and lactic acid development as well as the CO2 and trace ethanol production in the starter). In Ken's book he asserts that the difference in flavor between sourdough in different places has more to do with local(ly-developed) tastes, recipes, and practices.

My sense is that you would have to be a very practiced (that is, consistent) baker to notice the difference imparted by the possibility culture in your own bread.

This is true. Just make your own. If you buy one and start feeding it, soon it will be identical to the one you could have made on your own. All it requires is flour and water and time.

Where "local environment" is extraordinarily influenced by the flour you feed your starter with.

Which itself is influenced by growing location and conditions, storage, transport, and distribution, etc.

I'd be interested in seeing specific research on how much "wild yeast" and lactobacilli outside of the feeder flour actually influences starter. My strong suspicion is that this is somewhat less than is often considered, if only because of the difficulty of starting one's own sourdough from sterilised flour (bleached), which is to say, being highly dependent on wild yeast.

The other factor I suspect is the evolution of one's own starter culture based on conditions (feed frequency, temperature, flour, storage conditions, light/darkness, etc.) in which it exists.

I moved once, out into a desert area. The microbes in the new environment were so virulent and horrible that my starter was instantly destroyed.

Every new starter I tried would flare up into great bubbles after one day, and would just stink to high heavens after 3. It looked like a great starter, but exuded the most revolting rotten smell.

I tried bleaching all the containers. Changing flours. Storing it in a different place. Nothing. Something out there in the desert was ready each time.

I’ve made my own starter a couple times. It’s really no big deal. Takes a couple weeks of waiting but maybe an hour of total time over that two weeks.

I've made my own! This was 15 years ago or so, in Los Angeles. It was fun as a hobby project; I started a bunch, harvesting wild yeasts from my kitchen, outdoors, etc. A couple turned out pretty yummy, a couple were pretty funky. But recently I bought some dried starter from a well-respected line and have been blown away with how much better the starter we bought is compared to the wild harvested runs I tried. If a friend asked I would tell them it's really not worth it to use a wild strain unless your hobby is microbiology... If your hobby is baking, stick with a known-good starter.

King Arthur has a recipe for those interested:

<https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/blog/2012/04/05/make-your-o...>

There's now quite a sourdough ... culture ... substantially invigorated after the Covid-19 pandemic (xkcd:2296), with books, podcasts, websites, vloggers, etc. I picked up much of my own baking knowledge through these (starting with a few YT videos, and progressing through my own experimentation and further research). I'm still going and just had a couple of slices of my latest batch with eggs.

Starters are startlingly resilient, though you can kill them off or spoil them, largely through heat or prolonged regret.

As any good sysadmin knows, good backups are essential. I'd restarted my batch from a pinch of dough that was proofing in the fridge after one inglorious encounter with a microwave and housemate. After that I dried and froze a batch (King Arthur covers this as well: <>), and a tablespoon of the frozen starter plus about a half-dozen feedings has it going strong again. (This differs from KA's recovery method, but worked.)

Drying another batch to freeze as we speak, can never be too sure ;-)

Using someone else's starter can help bootstrap the process, but your own environment's selective pressures and new sources of yeast, most of whice come from whole-meal flour, which is what you should use to start your own batch. Note that bleached white flour, whilst it can be used to bake or feed however much I'd advise against it, typically lacks any active yeast. I did do some baking with unbleached flour when that was all that could be obtained, and the results while poorer than with unbleached / whole-meal were still quite acceptable, just not my preference.

We got some during the pandemic. My wife went through the “make your own bread” phase with great enthusiasm. (And results!) We’d tend to Carl, our container of starter, and talk about how well it was doing. Then it trailed off and it’s gone to stater heaven. Pity.

The only shipped starter that will ever make a difference is San Francisco starter and that's because there is a literal mutant bacteria in the culture that causes much higher lactic activity than normal. And it'll only make a difference if you use it straight.

All other shipped starters are just a shortcut to going to a local baker and asking for a donation (I've done this dozens of times, all over the world; when I've wanted a fresh/homemade loaf), or just spending a week's time and ~350g of wasted flour developing your own.

I make a little framework for “stupid simple HTML sites” and use it as a “starter” for most of my own work.

https://neat.joeldare.com

Bah! when I requested my sample way back in `96 we only had USENET, and we LIKED it!

It’s also easy to make stupid simple HTML sites that aren’t hideous to look at (CSS doesn’t make it slow) that are fit for purpose and are really, really fast. My website is one such example.

Putting JS in the render path is a mistake.

Lucky. I caught smallpox from mine.