Help in Culling my Starters
Greetings to my new friends in knead,
This, my first post, is not an introduction, but a query .
Two starters, each about a year old, have birthed several offspring and are more than this Nanny can keep up with. Neglected in the back of the fridge, abandoned on a crowded counter, or repeatedly plumped like a child in the 1950s, each has been revived and fed multiple times and seems quite distinct from the others.
I'd like to run each through its paces in identical and rather plain recipes yielding, say, 8-12 oz finished bread apiece. I usually do three proving periods. One starter began its life with rye, the other with potatoes, and their diets eventually became the same. At this point, Flavour and Fragrance interest me more than texture or vigour of the rise. I'd like to get back to hosting only two crocks.
In baking I like chewy and complex "simple" Italian breads that beg for butter or a sauce to redeem-- so likely the more sour of the two. And I love bread that sings to me of the Promised Land with whole grains, some soaked or sprouted, with eggs and milk and honey. While griddle cakes, scones, biscuits, shortcake and sweet stuff are frequently in my kitchen, they are so easily tweaked with sugars or buttermilk that the characteristics of the starter seem less obvious.
What would you recommend for recipes that show off the starter and which would be suitable for comparing them, allowing them to go through the trial together, subject to varying times for proofing? Is this even a reasonable approach? Or should I make mountains of pita?
Thanks for entertaining my insanity.
Stanzia
I've read a theory that if you take any number of different starters. Even if they are clearly different, not just in behavior but it's been established in a lab the dominant species are different. And then you feed all of those starters the same diet on the same schedule in the same environment, they'll soon become indistinguishable. This is easily explained by Darwin's theories of natural selection: whichever species are best suited to the new routine will soon become dominant even if they weren't before. There could be an exception in a case that a starter had a dominant species that happened to do well with the new routine, but does not exist in the other starters and does not get introduced to the other starters through flour or any other sources. But this is unlikely.
You probably already have some idea of which of your starters have been more vigorous and/or which ones have produced some bread you've especially enjoyed lately. I'd advise you just select one or more of those. Taking the time to do a test bake for several different starters seems unlikely to be worthwhile.