Sourdough on my mind | The Fresh Loaf

Some of the recent questions about sourdough have gotten me thinking about sourdough more than is usual. I have three starters/cultures in my refrigerator. Two use home milled flour and one uses unbleached commercial flour. All three make sourdough bread that is mild in taste and the resulting breads rise nicely. I have even used sourdough instead of yeast in an enriched bread and it turned out nicely.

I keep two starters in jars about 24 ounces in size and the other in a 1L jar. I have been thinking of smaller jars since I only keep about 4 ounces of each starter on hand. The recipes I've used lately only call for about 2 Tbsp of starter to make a levain.

So, my questions.

If I were to keep larger amounts of starter on hand would the flavor change?

I haven't tried it yet but if I were to make the same recipe but use a different starter in each, would I notice a difference?

BTW, I like the mild flavor my starters/cultures currently produce. I'd not want to go too sour unless I could do it for a specific loaf and not permanently change the starter.

Mike

Larger amount of starter maintained will not affect flavor.

Using a different starter in the same recipe will lead to differences. Whether you'd consider them subtle or dramatic depends on your palate, how much starter is used in your formula, and how active your starter is.

Larger amount of starter maintained will not affect flavor.

Hi Mike Some thoughts for you. If you work with levains (preferments) for all of your breads then you only need to keep 1 starter. There is little benefit maintaining 3 separate ones and it likely leads to a lot of wasteage every time you discard and feed. You are currently keeping about 100-120g of each starter so some 300-360g of starter in total. If you discard half each time you feed then you're throwing 150g flour down the sink each time. We've all been there. The good news is that it's all totally unnecessary. My recommendation to you is to keep just ONE starter, prefereably one made with freshly milled flour and preferably rye flour if you have it. Everything you bake using starters can be made from that one starter. As you have seen with your recipe, it uses a levain or preferment. This is just a large quantity of active starter which is BUILT UP from a tiny amount of your own mother starter. Because that initial amount is tiny, it has no bearing on the flavour of the finished levain/preferment. The flavour comes from whatever flour you choose to build it up with. So for example you could make the following 3 levains, each of 150g: 20g rye mother starter + 65g White flour + 65g water = 150g of white levain for a white sourdough 20g rye mother starter + 65g Wholewheat flour + 65g water = 150g of levain for a wholewheat sourdough 20g rye mother starter + 65g Rye flour + 65g water = 150g of rye levain for a 100% rye loaf like pumpernickle You can actually do the levain builds in 2 feeding stages using less of the mother starter, which is what most people do. Using 2 or more feeds to build ensures you have a good active peaking levain ready for baking. So it would go like this: Feed 1: 10g rye mother starter + 20g White flour + 20g water = 50g ====> Feed 2: 50g white levain + 50g White flour + 50g water = 150g white levain Same for wholewheat or rye levains. The rye content in the final levain is minimal for the white and wholewheat levains. In the case of the 2 feed builds there is just 10g of rye in the final 150g of levain which is unnoticable in terms of colour and flavour. Note also that if you use these levains for all your bakes, then you do not need to discard at any stage. Your ONE mother starter can live in the fridge. You only need keep say 30g of mother starter, no more. When you want to bake just use 20g of it to start the build of those preferments. The remaining 10g of mother starter in the jar you add 10g rye and 10g water to bring it back to 30g and pop it back in the fridge for next week. Simples! Advantages: - Only 1 mother starter kept - Takes up a tiny space in the fridge - No flour is discarded or wasted

I appreciate the feedback. Volume will not affect flavor and if levains are used, multiple starters are not necessary. In terms of simplicity the levain method works nicely.

I started my starter a year ago using King Arthur Organic Whole Wheat flour and shifted over to Organic AP flour. It is generally fed the AP flour. It makes good sourdough bread in the times suggested by Forkish and Robertson.

What benefit to you see in using fresh rye flour to maintain a starter (vs. creating one)?

Or something like that. Rye is supposed to have more of the beneficial enzymes and something-ases (technical term - I are not a scientist...) than any other grain, I seem to remember. I happen to use a rye sour as the mother for all my levains these days because that is what I have, thanks to my deli rye obsession. I don't have anything to compare it to at the moment (I used to have a white AP starter years ago, and it certainly gave me no grounds for complaint, but it's so long ago that I don't really remember in any useful way), but it is extremely lively, a serious case of If It Ain't Broke Don't Fix It.

Hello,

i'm just connecting to this topic with my questions. Right now i always feed my starter with equal amounts of water, flour and starter, wait couple of hours and make the dough. Is there a difference in making a Levain with a tini amount of starter and let it ripe longer? I thout this will enlarge the amount of bacteria and the Bred will be more sour, just as if you will let the Bread ferment longer, instead of using a greater amount of starter and having a shorter rising time.

Thanks for the help!

In simple terms - I cannot explain in depth, there are those here who can - using a smaller amount of starter and allowing your dough to ferment longer will give a stronger flavour but using a larger pre-ferment and allowing a shorter fermenting time for your dough will produce a more mellow flavour.

Funny isn't it. More starter = less flavour. Less starter = stronger flavour.

It's all to do with fermenting time.

Some increase the flavour by slowing the fermenting time by keeping the dough in the fridge.

The reason why less starter and a longer fermentation will give your bread a stronger flavor, AFAIK is because most of the flavor development comes from the LABs which reproduce faster than the yeast at basically all temperatures.

Thanks for the replys.

So like i thought, more flavor with less starter means a more sour bread!?

I mean less starter in the levain, not the dough in general :)

"mean less starter in the levain, not the dough in general"

The starter is the levain. Are you talking about building a pre-ferment?

yes, that's what i mean with levian.

Building a larger pre-ferment to go into your dough is like adding a larget quantity of starter so less sour. So your pre-ferment becomes the starter. Difference is you might build your pre-ferment to a different hydration but basically it's like adding a lot of starter.

By slowing down the fermentation by bringing the temperature down i.e. doing the bulk ferment or final proof in the fridge.

Thank you, but i mean how making a preferment with a small amount of starter and give it a longer time to ripe instead of taking a large amount of starter and let the preferment ripe just for a couple of hours will affect the end product.

i'm dont mean the gerneral amount of preferment.

I could use for instance 10 grams of starter, 70 grams of water and 70 grams of flour and let it ripe 10 hours or I could use 50 grams of starter, 50 grams of water and 50 grams of flour. Both would be 150 grams of preferment, but I guess the longer riped preferment will have more bacteria in it, thus the bread will be more sour. Is that right?Just the same as it is with the bread rising time. the smaller the amount of starter, the longer the fermenting time and the more sour the bread...

If you feed your starter different amounts will your starter change?

Probably but not as much as the final dough.

When we add the starter it has fed, risen and peaked. Then we add it to our dough and the process starts again.

The beauty of sourdough is the variables and even something slightly different will produce a different result. You probably will get a slight variation but essentially you're adding starter and larger quantities will produce a more mellow flavour even if you have created the pre-ferment with different amounts.

That's as much as I can explain. You'll need an expert to explain further.

Possibly a little confusion going on here so I will add my 2 penneth. The sourness in your bread generally comes from your starter. Every starter has a level of acidity and this comes from lactic acids and acetic acids and these impact sourness differently. Lactic acid tastes sour but you need quite a lot of it to notice that sourness. Acetic acid as we know from vinegar, is very tangy and it only requires a tiny amount of it to make something taste sour. How you choose to maintain your starter will determine what the balance is between lactic and acetic acids. Variables such as time, temperature, hydration etc play a part in this balance. When I first started making sourdoughs I had little idea about the different ways you can tweak and maintain a starter to achieve different results. It's worth doing some Googling in this respect. On this forum we have 2 members who operate at the very extremes of these starter balances. DABrownman maintains his starter in such a way as to make it incredibly sour and tangy. It lives in his fridge and gets a feed only once every 3-4 weeks sometimes even longer ! At the other end of the spectrum we have Italian Pannetone expert MWilson who needs a starter for such sweet products and thus it needs to be as mild as possible. So his starter is actually a Lievito (again go Google). So the quantity of starter you use in a loaf isn't the determining factor for the sourness. It's how that starter is maintained. A levain/preferment, by it's very nature is just a feeding of some starter. But how you feed it and maintain it will affect the balance of acids. I'm not an expert in all of this, and perhaps DA or MWilson will chip in here, but my instinct suggests that you can't massively affect the balance with one overnight preferment. I think it takes a longer sustained programme of feeding/maintenance over days or weeks, to significantly shift the balance. For example if you had an average white tangy sourdough starter and you wanted to change it into a Lievito Madre for making sweet pannetones, it would take a few weeks of a specific feeding regime to get it to that state.

Please don't turn me in to the sourdough police after reading this.

My starters are kept in jars in the refrigerator. I try to feed them weekly whether I need them or not. Sometimes I forget and several weeks go by. If I am planning on making sourdough, I will feed the starter once a day for awhile before it is needed. I take them from the refrigerator, discard about half, add one ounce of flour and one of water, mix well and return it to the refrigerator. I will also leave it out for about an hour, on occasion, to look for activity.

In doing this, I have starter that works fine with levains, rises very well, has good oven spring and the taste is very mild. The texture is chewy and the crumb fairly open.

Would I recommend my method? No. But it has worked repeatedly for me. I've even used it in enriched breads instead of commercial yeast. Of course, it takes overnight for the levain to develop and a couple hours or so for a bulk rise but speed is not what I'm after with sourdough. I've used this with the Vermont Sourdough recipe in Bread a few times with good results. Both the whole wheat and rye versions. Rise times were consistent with what the book said to expect.

But I wonder. If I built the levain from the whole wheat/rye instead of bread flour, would the taste change dramatically?

[i]"If I built the levain from the whole wheat/rye instead of bread flour, would the taste change dramatically?"[/i] This is no different from asking "If I put more whole wheat/rye in my dough instead of bread flour, would the taste change dramatically?" The starter/levain is just flour and water, your main dough is also flour and water, the two combine to make more flour and water. If you put a decent amount of rye starter into your main dough (maybe 100g or more) then your loaf rye content is at least 50g of rye (assuming starter is 100% hydration). That 50g rye will add a nuttier taste to the loaf and affect the crumb and colour slightly. So as stated earlier, what counts is what type of flour you build your levains with. A white loaf made using a levain made from 10g rye starter plus 70g white flour and 70g water isn't going to taste of rye in any sense. It's your choice how to build the levains and thus how to tweak with the end taste, texture and colour of the loaf. Either way, I hope you will consider just keeping tiny amounts of starter and stop discarding as it's not necessary :-)

I know if I do a wholesale change of flour that the taste and everything will change. What I meant to inquire about was if all flours stayed the same but the levain used rye instead of white but the remaining flour was still white, would the flavor change? If the recipe called for 80/20 white/rye and normally made a levain from the white would using that 20% rye in the levain cause a difference than a similarl levain (in size) made using the white flour? It's easier for me to think it than to say it.

I did make a bread with 55% bread flour, 40% fresh milled whole wheat and 5% fresh milled rye. You still could taste the rye. This particular bread used conventional yeast.

BTW, I only keep about 2-4 ounces of starter on hand.

Like I said, there is no difference between flour in your levain and flour in the main dough. Flour is flour ! So you must consider the TOTAL AMOUNT of each flour in the final dough mix to understand what the end result will be. A white loaf recipe that is supposed to have 100% white flour in the main dough and be made with a levain built with white flour, will look and taste different to a loaf made with 100% white flour in the main dough and a levain made with just rye flour. The level of difference between the 2 loaves depends on the quantities of different flours in the final dough. [i]"I only keep about 2-4 ounces of starter on hand."[/i] Whatever amount we keep needs to be in-line with how often we bake, such that there is never (or very seldom) any need to discard anything when it comes time to feed the starter. How often do you bake and how much starter/levain do your recipes call for?

My understanding is that different grains ferment differently, and therefore provide different flavor profiles when used as the levain. This makes sense since the grain used in the levain is fermenting the longest, so that must influence the flavor If different grains ferment differently.