I have been having a problem with starters for almost a year now, which has resulted me giving up sourdough baking in general. Given, I once said that I was not happy unless something is rising in my kitchen- like reading a good book.
I put my starter(s) in the fridge for a couple of weeks and when I pull them out, they just don't rise like (I think) they should. No weird pineapple juice (what is up with that?) or anything. I start with a ratio of 1:1:1 and nothing, I double it and nothing, I stiffen it up, nothing, all the same. Some said that it might be that I have a weak-protein flour. My starters turn to goo, to a liquid, way way too fast.
Thinking some sort of contamination, faulty flour, flesh-eating yeast or bacteria; I pitched the starter and all its discard- it's ok, my grandmother wasn't from the Yukon.
Now I started a rye NMNF starter but now I hear that rye starters, like Apple getting along with Android, sometimes doesn't play nice with other flours.
Oh and by the way, yes the rye starter is going very very well. But will it declare war against my other flours when I try and make a bread?
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If you want, once it’s running on all cylinders, you can do what I do with mine: feed it a combo of whole rye, whole wheat, and bread/AP flour. I figure I do more baking with those flours than any other, so it will be ready for just about any bread I make.
Or, you can use it as a pure rye flour starter and it will work well, too.
Baker's choice.
Paul
Good advice. As a pure experiment, I took one of the halves and added bread flour to it purely as an experiment mind you. It is not doing as well as its pure counterpart. I guess I had to wait until it was solid and established after the five days?
But yes, Rye likes to rise doesn’t it?
v
Consequently, just about anything could cause it to stall, at least temporarily.
I do know that the inhabitants of starters tend to optimize for whatever they are consistently fed, so a change in food might slow them down for a couple of feeding cycles. Then they bounce back as they become accustomed to the new food source. If you want to maintain the pure rye NMNF starter for all of your sourdough baking, you might want to do a couple of transitional feeds between the all-rye starter and the recipe-specific levain. Then again, your starter might just wade into the new-to-it flour(s) of the levain without a hiccup.
Paul