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a sourdough fact
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bomberqueen17:
Ah, here is a Fact I recently learned about sourdough starters!
(remember those? I still have mine! It’s still going!)
Whole wheat flour makes the starter more active, faster. There are enzymes present in high-quality whole wheat flour that the yeast uses to grow.
White flour will be considerably less bubbly and active, and will not puff up nearly as much. It can also go much longer between feedings.
I’ve had to transition my starter back and forth, from wheat to white and back, a couple of times based on non-availability of specific flour in my nomadic travels (I’ve done so somewhat gradually each time, if I can, tapering off the old flour and onto the new flour as much as I can), and I can tell you that on an all-white diet, my starter becomes much less bubbly and more of a uniform paste. I even sometimes think it’s dead; I can leave it several days and it looks like the last time I fed it. But it’s not dead. I haven’t refrigerated it for more than an intermittent couple of days, and it hasn’t done anything worse than smell vaguely of vinegar or acetone once in a while. And if I put whole wheat flour in it, with a couple hours of digestion time it is as vigorous as it ever has been, and crawls up the side of the jar.
So I just thought I’d put that out there, because I haven’t seen anything else written about this– white flour is much more forgiving because it takes longer for the starter to chew through it. Whole wheat is more satisfying and I like the texture and flavor better, but white flour will keep it alive and it doesn’t take much. I’ve kept mine alive on about two tablespoons every other day or so for the last month.
(People say you should be consistent with flour but they also say a lot of things, and I’m sure they’re not wrong, but sometimes my best is not what they say it ought to be so I’m used to this sort of thing.)
bomberqueen17:
Ah, here is a Fact I recently learned about sourdough starters!
(remember those? I still have mine! It’s still going!)
Whole wheat flour makes the starter more active, faster. There are enzymes present in high-quality whole wheat flour that the yeast uses to grow.
White flour will be considerably less bubbly and active, and will not puff up nearly as much. It can also go much longer between feedings.
I’ve had to transition my starter back and forth, from wheat to white and back, a couple of times based on non-availability of specific flour in my nomadic travels (I’ve done so somewhat gradually each time, if I can, tapering off the old flour and onto the new flour as much as I can), and I can tell you that on an all-white diet, my starter becomes much less bubbly and more of a uniform paste. I even sometimes think it’s dead; I can leave it several days and it looks like the last time I fed it. But it’s not dead. I haven’t refrigerated it for more than an intermittent couple of days, and it hasn’t done anything worse than smell vaguely of vinegar or acetone once in a while. And if I put whole wheat flour in it, with a couple hours of digestion time it is as vigorous as it ever has been, and crawls up the side of the jar.
So I just thought I’d put that out there, because I haven’t seen anything else written about this– white flour is much more forgiving because it takes longer for the starter to chew through it. Whole wheat is more satisfying and I like the texture and flavor better, but white flour will keep it alive and it doesn’t take much. I’ve kept mine alive on about two tablespoons every other day or so for the last month.
(People say you should be consistent with flour but they also say a lot of things, and I’m sure they’re not wrong, but sometimes my best is not what they say it ought to be so I’m used to this sort of thing.)