Common Starter Queries - My Unsolved Starter Mysteries

1. 'Different' types of starter. IMO it's a misnomer. When you keep a "Mother" starter all you are really doing is culturing a quantity of yeasts and Labs in some form of suspension. That suspension could be water and white flour, rye flour, spelt four, wheat flour. I am sure if we went to a laboratory they could find some kind of gel that would equally work as a suspension and food source. So bottom line is that it doesn't matter which suspension you choose just so long as it provides the food that the beasties need. This is Mother Starter only. When we talk in terms of a quantity of leavening agent for your main dough then it does matter because the quantites of flour involved will affect the taste and levels of gluten. Using levains/preferments is a good way to go using a tiny portion of your mother starter (whatever it is) to seed a larger quantity of flour and water, the latter being that which your recipe needs. So, on a domestic level for amateurs, one single mother starter is all that is needed from which many different preferements can be built. On a commercial bakery level things are diferent because they need large quantities of different levains every day so they just keep separate tubs of effectively mother starters, usually one white, one rye, one wholewheat, one spelt and sometimes others. 2. Direct into mix or build leaven. As above. In a domestic situation we aren't baking loaves every day so it doesn't make sense to keep say 180g of starter on hand at all times for that one loaf that needs 180g of it. You'd be wasting an awful lot of flour to keep feeding 180g of starter on a regular basis. In fact it is unnecessary to waste or discard any starter if you plan correctly. By keeping a tiny amount of starter, say 30g you can simply build up to the larger quantity your recipes need. So say you bake once per week on a Saturday and the loaf needs 180g of starter. You can keep 30g mother starter in the fridge. On Friday morning you can take 20g of it and add 20g flour and 20g water to make 60g of levain in total. The remaining 10g of mother you feed 10g flour and 10g water bringing it back to 30g and put it back in the fridge for next week. Friday night you take the 60g of levain and add 60g flour and 60g water making 180g in total and leave that out overnight. You then have the 180g of levain/starter you need on Saturday for your bake and you wasted nothing, no discard anywhere. The exact quantities involved here are up to you and can be tweaked as the recipes require. I've used quantities that keep the levain at 100% hydration (same amounts of flour and water). Some recipes might need you to build a drier levain. 3. Replacing 'instant yeast' for my starter in recipes. The thing here is that a recipe with yeast will produce a very different product to a recipe with wild yeast starter. The recipe end-to-end will have been crafted with either yeast or starter in mind. The idea of wanting to take a yeasted recipe and just change the yeast for starter is another misnomer really. Everything changes. Levels of acidity will be different, so might gluten development, dough strength and extensibility, proofing times and crucially also the taste of the loaf. If you want to use starter, choose a recipe designed for that imo. I'm not saying you can't do what you are suggesting, but there are a lot of variables and in the end you are creating a different end product. GL