Feeding start with flour with absorbic acid?

I typically use high quality flour from a mill directly for baking which have no additives. However I would prefer to refresh my starter with a cheaper organic flour from the supermarket, which is almost half the price but has Absorbic Acid added. Would the absorbic acid additive affect the starter in any way?

ascorbic acid as an additive is simply a vitamin c additive. i wouldn't think this would interfere with your starter since the quantity added is usually very small and acts as a natural flour preservative.

check out this link on tfl.

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/7416/ascorbic-acid

hope this helps, claudia

Almost religiously in French boulangeries- they typical quantities are less than single percentage points so doubtul its gonna kill anything - keep in mind American flours are choc-o-block full of additives, bleached etc and and you rarely hear of people discouraging use of basic supermarket brands. I have two starters going strong and fed exclusively on t65 with ascorbic so from experience it seems nothing to worry about :)

The purpose of improving with ascorbic is more for the yeast - you may notice that instant yeast contains ascorbic acid - no idea how but apparently it stimulates growth of commercial yeast and although a starter is not the same species I can't imagine it would have the opposite affect - may be a good google topic to see how the acid interacts with such a culture ...