March 8, 2021 - 9:48am
Confused about The Rye Baker Sour Culture Maintenance
I’m reading through Stanley Ginsberg’s The Rye Baker and I have a question about the Sour Culture Maintenance Refresh instructions:
- 70 g Rye flour
- 70 g Warm water
- 7 g Rye sour culture
- Mix the ingredients, cover, and ferment at room temperature overnight. Store refrigerated.
The rye sour culture that is built over seven days weighs about 210 g. For the refresh, does that mean to discard all but 7 g of the rye sour culture? That seems very wasteful.
Or are these instructions meant for building a sponge to be used in a recipe?
I have not baked with sourdough for many, many years, so I’m trying to learn about current practices. I’m also mainly interested in using the sour for rye breads, not for all my bakes.
Thanks!
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to know the condition and behavior of the 210g 7 day old rye culture. If it is ready to switch gears to maintenance feeding or still in the later stages of becoming a viable starter.
The maintenance feeding with only 7g culture is correct. (Can also be used to make a "sponge.") But if your culture is ready to bake bread, most of that 210g will be used in dough. Not much waste. So the question remains, how is the rye sourdough behaving right now?
Thanks for the reply. I haven't started the rye culture yet. The scientist in me is reviewing the procedure to understand it before beginning. The culture is built over seven days; days 2–7 are:
At this point, it is considered ready to use. The next section of the book describes the refresh procedure. The author states that it is best to use a culture that has not gone more than 36 hours since its last feeding. It seems to be a waste to discard 203 g of sour culture in the refresh. I guess I'm not understanding the rationale of the procedure.
One of my biggest concerns that is keeping me hesitant about sourdough is all the waste. (And I'm not really interested in making something with the discard.) I also am not baking rye exclusively, yeasted doughs predominate, and I only make one sandwich loaf a week.
Many of the recipes in The Rye Baker use the sour culture for acidification and include yeast for leavening. The amounts used in some recipes are small—as little as 14 g—although most use 40 g or more.
I may get flak for my thoughts on sourdough, but I have been making pretty tasty bread with just yeast!
One option is simply to use smaller quantities of starter, flour and water. I refresh my wheat starter every 5 days using something like 8g starter / 16 flour / 11 water. Small plastic pots otherwise destined for the recycle bin make ideal containers for this size of ferment. I use one of those flat silicone "one size fits all" silicone lids as a cover.
Lance
your rye recipe handy and ready to use when the rye culture is showing great promise so that that discard is used instead to make a loaf. The 70:70:70 beginning feeds can also be reduced to 20:20:20 but great care must be given to keep the starter warm and from drying out. Back splashing, or reserving some of the culture to feed while dumping the rest is important to prevent having to feed all the bacteria and yeast growing in the culture.
Later on it is possible to keep just a small amount of culture and simply make more when needed. So you may end up having a rye mother culture you maintain and keep refrigerated and a second culture that is Inoculated from that mother culture growing for the next bake.
The culture is alive and it eats and poops just like having say chickens. Let's feed a baby chicken and say it eats 50 kilos of chicken feed until it is big enough to kill. You don't expect the chicken to weigh 50 kilos when it goes into the oven. So the process "wastes" 48 kilos. Thank goodness getting yeasts started and growing is on a much smaller scale.
The discards from the first sourdough culture when trying to grow it is not necessarily something you want to keep and better off in the compost until the desired bacteria and yeasts take over the culture. That can take 5 days or seven or ten or longer depending of temperature, the flour and the water. Live organisms that don't read directions. Pay attention to signs that the starter culture is progressing properly. The aromas, the slight color changes, separation of flour and water, any bubbles size and shapes, thickness or thinning in the consistency, temps night and day.
I really appreciate your insight into the rye culture. I don't mind the discards during the initial build because I understand the purpose for them (although I have thought about a 50:50:50 scale).
If I understand correctly about the seed idea, after the initial build is it possible to use that starter until only 10–20 g remains, each time performing the refresh for a recipe? Then, any remaining culture and "refresh" not used in the recipe would become the new seed culture. Or is the seed culture maintained differently?
Thanks!
There are many approaches, but personally I keep a small "mother" starter which is stored in the fridge and routinely refreshed on roughly a weekly basis.
To bake, I take a portion of this starter (only a few grams) and use it to build a levain, usually over 2-3 refreshes to build strength and quantity. I would size the builds so that I am making hardly any excess levain - just a little extra to allow for losses.
Lance
I am also puzzled by the 1:10:10 (7g:70g:70g) refreshes. vs the more common recommendation for 1:1;1
I don't worry about the discard because they go into a container in the fridge. So far, I have had better results with the discard than the bread. I found a bunch of recipes and collected some of them Discard Recipes. The pancakes, crepes, cornbread, and galette/pie dough all work nicely. The muffins are good too, considering that I don't use any sugar for health reasons.
I was just starting out making a rye sour culture, so I didn't completely understand the process. I get it now. Once I built the mother starter, I used a portion of that to create the "maintenance refresh" that I use on a continual basis. I have started to try a 5:50:50 g regimen to conserve flour. I have also gone as long as 2–3 week without refreshing and have had no problem with leavening or souring.
When you say you've had better luck with the discard than the recipes, do you mean recipes from The Rye Baker? I have found a few errors in the recipes in the book and on his website. I wish there was an errata for the book.
Most of the German levain/sponge builds that I have seen are 1:10:10, if that's of any use.
I thought I would use discards, but I already have enough bread from my regular loaves, so I have just thrown it out. I'll have to look at some of the discard recipes in your link.