May 20, 2020 - 10:19pm
Starter - Can I use it on the second rise?
So my starter has doubled when I woke up this morning after feeding it before I slept.
But my other ingredients are not yet ready. I need to bake some potatoes baked for an hour for a potato bread recipe.
I stirred the starter down. and it is slowly rising again.
Am I able to use it when it finally doubles without actually feeding it a second time?
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I've heard the Foodgeek say you can use a starter within 12 hours of it reaching it's peak. Haven't tried more than a couple of hours myself, so ymmv.
Hi Somaek, thanks for the heads up. Despite using colder water for the feed last night, the starter has already dipped 7+ hours after feeding. I still used it as it passed the float test. Keeping my fingers crossed on this one!
I have not experimented with this myself. But what matters for baking bread is not the peak in terms of how much your starter rises, it is the peak in activity of the microscopic organisms living within it. Since we can't really see or judge that directly, we use the rise and fall of our starter as a rough way to gauge that. Since it is an imperfect way of determining when our starter is at the optimum for bread baking anyway, combined with the fact that it is more of a bell curve than a sharp peak, you have a pretty wide window to use it to get fairly good results.
When you feed, you dilute the microbes, and it is important to wait for them to reproduce. Stirring is different, so I don't think you need to wait at all. Waiting until it doubles a second time might or might not be waiting too long. I would just use it as soon as your potatoes are ready. The closer you are to the usual time you use it (which I assume is roughly at its first peak), the closer you will be to the results you are used to.
Thank you for this explanation, certainly helped me understand better. Also, it didn't double again after the stirring.