Do I need to switch my rye flour starter to white flour starter?

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EllaInKitchen on 6 May 2016 at 04:13

Hi I'm new here.

I just made my first rye flour starter and I'M VERY EXCITED！ ;)

However I want to make some white bread and I'm not sure if I should switch my starter?

I read about posts about people doing the switch but i feel if the starter really only takes a very small amount of the whole bread and it should doesn't matter if the starter is rye or white?

 

Ella

I think of sourdough starter as the stuff that carries yeast and lactobacilli into my dough.  The yeast is necessary to get the dough to rise:  the lactobacilli; to make it sour.  My experience suggests that, regardless of how "active" you think your sourdough starter is, if it contains any active microorganisms (yeast and lactobacilli), it will do the trick.  I've lots of experience using 50 gms of starter, instead of the 200 gms a recipe called for, and had no trouble having a successful bread.

It's because of this experience that I pretty much don't care what flour I used to make the starter.  I use so little of it that it cannot possibly be a major determinant in the taste of the bread.

The only argument I've heard in this is from those who sell their bread and want to be able to say "100% this or that kind of flour was used."  I don't have that problem.

Unless you need to make a genuinely 100% white flour loaf.

So if your recipe needs 150g of starter then you can take just 30g of your rye, add to this 60g flour and 60g water, leave for a few hours until bubbly then use it in your recipe. You'll still have a small quantity of rye in the final loaf though, but it's really not a lot - e.g. if the main recipe calls for 500g flour, 150g starter, then you have 30g rye out of 575g total flour or 5%.

-Gordon

your figure of ~5% rye seems not to factor in that the 30g of rye starter includes water. So if it's a 100% starter the actual amount of rye in the final dough would be 15g not 30g. 

5-10 of starter using 3 builds to about 10-15% pre-fermented flour using what ever flour is in the mix for the bread.  If it has whole grains in it, I use them to build the levain - if not then it is white flour.    Even a 500 g white flour bread would only have 5 g of rye in it - or 1%.  Whole rye is better for you than any white flour anyway.

I've only been at this for 5 months, but since my wife HATES rye bread, I was maintaining 2 starters, one AP and one Rye.  Just to experiment I made a batch of 2 breads and combined the starters (60g rye, 60g AP, 120g water) just to see what would happen.  The bread got rave reviews and she never knew the difference!

Now I simply keep a 50/50 rye/AP starter and life is MUCH simpler :)