Hello: I have been maintaining a white flour starter and a whole wheat starter (that I made from the white starter) for some time now, but since I don't bake much, it seems wasteful. I make more whole wheat bread than white, so could I just keep the whole wheat starter and use it on white bread recipes, or would that not work well? It's 100% hydration, and it's Carl's Oregon Trail starter, if that makes any difference. Thank you!
Just take it out a day or so ahead of time and remove a bit and refresh it with whichever flour you are planning to use. Good luck
Yeah, just keep one and use it as you want.
If you use a WW starter in a white loaf, it won't be 100% white. The % will depend on how much starter you use relative to the amount of flour, and also whether you use your WW starter directly or to build a levain, presumably with white flour.
So basically, if you know what % of WW you're okay to have in your loaf, you can choose your method and adjust your recipe accordingly.
and build a levain to suit your needs
of stiff NMNF rye starter and I build the levain for the dough from it with what ever whole flour is going in the bread or what ever white flour is going in then bread. This weeks bread has 5% whole multi- grain and 10% sprouted whole multigrain so the levain is built with 10g of rye starter and 75 g of whole and sprouted red and white wheat, rye and spelt and 75 g of water. The rest of the bread is bread flour so I could have used it for the levain but would rather get the whole grains in there instead to get them the wettest the longest so the acid can bread down the bran making for a loftier loaf. It doesn't make any difference what the starter is for me - it likes whatever it is fed to make that week's levain.
So what Abe said:-)