I can relate! I started my SourDough starter SanDy a week and a half ago and have made a couple of great loaves since then. I'm on my way to the store tonight for more flour.
That article has a new anti-reader mode feature I haven’t seen before — there’s an unrelated article on whiskey stones in the reader mode, while the real article is on sourdough.
Oh yeah, I see that too. It seems to be because of the "infinite" scroll they have where more articles are below. I wonder what it is about reader mode that misses the main article but sees that one.
> You can make your own starter, but it will be weak and basically tasteless for about 5-7 years. We sell verified OLD starters.
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.
There are different strains of yeast going around that can have different flavors but, in general, you can start a yeast culture on your counter and get good bread. You can tweak how you feed your starter (and build it up for use) to control how acidic the end product will be but you don't need to know much about it to just bake bread. This sounds like a marketing ploy or, possibly, something you would say if you were really into sourdough and had a discriminating palate. Source: worked in kitchens from 15 - early 20s, attended cooking school, been baking bread since I was a small child (including using sourdough which I fed as a chore to help my mother).
Old starters are good enough that no one has given up on them because they suck.
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.
My couple tries, the bread hasn’t risen well, the starter takes up fridge space, flavor’s not great, and the damn thing wastes tons of flour if I’m not using it nearly every day. I’ve put it in the “maybe when I’m retired” pile and will keep making very decent bread with dry active yeast in the meantime.
I'm not sure if keeping it in the fridge leads to a good starter, at least initially. I'd let it sit on the counter for the first week or so, to give it a chance to develop.
This’d be yet another topic on which everyone has very different “definitely the right way” advice, too, which isn’t helping. Though I have started them on the counter, it’s just after that they have to go in the fridge if you don’t want to waste flour on them every single day, apparently, and even then they’re still very hungry. Throwing out flour hurts when I know I could have made something good with it. I’ve tried recipes to use up “waste” starter without having to make bread with it, but it was still more effort than doing the same thing with other ingredients and the flavor was... poor.
i have a small jar of starter in the fridge that i replace weekly with 50% water and 50% flour of what I take out. any time i want to bake i feed it that day and use the half i was going to discard anyway to start that loaf of bread or a pizza dough. done this way it's not too hard to have a good sourdough starter in the fridge with minimal waste.
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.
Yeah, that's a huge exaggeration. I've thrown out and started multiple starters over the years and they have been great after a month or so.
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.
I have a starter that is about 40 years old now. Recently before the pandemic I was given a new starter by someone who didn't realize I had one (or did and thought I'd want to try a different one).
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.
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.
Yes, literally yeast from the air. That’s what sourdough is. If you bought some starter from the east coast and brought it to SF, within a few weeks you’ll have a SF sourdough.
So one thing I was wondering about this, do regional variations in yeasts lead to differences in the taste (and other characteristics) of the sourdough bread?
Don't you literally make sourdough starter out of thin air? Why would you get it from somewhere in the age of social distancing?
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.)
I got natural yeast from my local bakery. People buy less bread and such so they still have a lot of yeast they won't use and the shelf life is only 20-30 days so they started selling the yeast they buy wholesale. Huge 2kg brick. Used a bit but put the rest in the freezer.
My wife created a starter from scratch last year using only water, honey, flour, and raisins. I think the recipe was similar to this (http://www.bellarminemagazine.com/making-your-own-sourdough-...). It has since churned out a loaf or two on a weekly basis (and the discard turns into pizza dough.)
My ability to remain in ketosis is apparently indirectly proportional to the availability of delicious fresh sourdough bread.
I kickstarted some with some kombucha yeast that I had left over from a batch. I think it got the starter going faster, and it's been making good bread. I'm 15-20 generations in now.
It's a living culture of bacteria and yeast, it grows exponentially when given enough food. So long as you've got flour and water you can make as much as you want.
Some of these starters have interesting names. A bread maker gave me one called "California gold rush". He also had another, rather grimly named, "Black death". It's from those times.
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.
I wonder if there is going to a misguided arms race of extreme sourdough, just like there was for craft beer (and hot sauce)
"Oh your IPA has 120 IBUs? That's cute, mine has 150IBUs. Booyah!"
Flour is difficult to buy in some areas. It seems that lots of people have suddenly started making bread. I wonder how long they will keep doing it.
What's interesting is how few online stores have the ability to show only things that are in stock. We never thought this would be a useful feature.
What I've personally found frustrating: I'm looking for things (yeast and flour) that I know will be back in stock eventually; it would be nice if sites would let me backorder it so I can get into the queue for when they have stock again rather than having to check on it constantly.
For the curious, here’s the simple instructions for growing your own starter.
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.
> 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.
I wasn't referring to the difference in values, but the difference in meaning - though I could be misunderstanding, you appear to be defining "hydration" both as an exclusive percentage (75 water + 100 flour = 75%) and an inclusive percentage (100 water + 100 flour = 50%).
> 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).
> 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!
Heh, my wife has some sourdough starter that she got from her Mom who got it from here Mom etc. It's like pre-civil war sourdough starter. Except that like anything that grows it evolves over time. So I presume it picks up local yeast as it grows and eventually becomes a "local" variant. I find it particularly interesting that different starters make for bread that tastes different.
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 presume it picks up local yeast as it grows and eventually becomes a "local" variant
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.
I read the book Sourdough by Robin Sloan a few months back. Your anecdote reminds me of it! You might enjoy reading it -- it's a fun/quirky mix of technology and bread, set in SF.
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.
If you're in Seattle (ideally near the University District), I'd be happy to share some of my very healthy starter. Leave a window open and I'll huck it in.
I bought 2 pounds of active dry yeast a few weeks back. I just pulled out the bread machine I had for over a decade and made a loaf with my daughter. She had a ton of fun adding the ingredients.
63 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 129 ms ] thread[1] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bvgbk8/people-all-over-th...
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.
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.
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.
My ability to remain in ketosis is apparently indirectly proportional to the availability of delicious fresh sourdough bread.
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.
Why would you kickstart a yeast (fungus) culture by giving it competing organisms (bacterial cultures) from yogurt?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sourdough
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.
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!
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.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33916024-sourdough
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.