I wanted to share an interesting experience rescuing a distressed 100% hydration SD starter.
The starter in question belongs to my daughter who is at university. It was put into hibernation during the Christmas/New Year break by reducing hydration to 30% and rubbing it into tiny breadcrumb size pieces with plenty of loose flour around them and storing in the fridge. I did the same with mine and it was back to its usual self upon rehydration after the holidays.
Unfortunately for my daughters' starter, she came back to exams, coursework deadlines and lots of classes etc, so the starter was not reconstituted till last weekend (7 weeks in hibernation) . In fact, there were some small areas of mold here and there on the surface when we opened the container. I chucked out the moldy parts and took the rest of the 'crumbs' and rehydrated to 100%. Starter began to bubble and seemed active, but had a slightly musky smell from the mold and a slightly greyish hew, so I took about 40g and fed it at a 1:2:2 ratio. Again, good bubbling activity, but instead of rising, the starter just collapsed into a soupy sludge.
With the feeding, the slight smell of mold had gone and the color was creamy white again and activity seemed vigorous, so thought I would just add some more flour to the sludge and see if it started to gain some more structure, but instead it turned back into sludge very quickly.
I was preparing myself to announce to my daughter the demise of her starter, but thought I would give resuscitating it one more go. My reasoning was that there was some extreme proteolytic activity taking place and if I could find a way to tame that, the starter might be salvageable. I remembered reading an academic article about using chickpea flour to reduce protease activity in bread dough. Unfortunately I do not remember the reference for it, but the findings seemed to be that there is a sweet spot at which the chickpea flour does help to reduce proteolytic activity in the dough, but beyond that it doesn't do much and eventually makes the dough sticky and difficult to shape and handle. I just remembered that the sweet spot quantity was fairly small as a proportion of the total flour.
So, I decided to add a teaspoon of chickpea flour to the bubbling SD sludge that was about 160g in weight, and then a couple of heaped teaspoons of AP flour and see what would happen and, lo and behold, the sludge became a beautifully rising and structured pre-ferment, which I have now used to make a pretty descent 75% wholemeal wheat loaf that is about to come out of the oven, even if it over fermented at the proving stage because it was late and I had to go to bed, so put the banneton with the dough in the fridge for the night.
If anyone has any more on using chickpea or legume flour as a protease inhibitor in over enzymatic SD starters would be very interested to hear more, but though I would share this interesting chance finding/hack with others who may have problems with a problematic starter in case it is of help.
If it helps - great. Question is - why. Enjoy!
you sent me down a mini-rabbit-hole, Rene.
First, I found this study, which indicates that up to 7.5% chickpea flour improves dough strength -- https://www.grains.k-state.edu/research/ccl/files/publication_pdf/2023_Cereal%20Chem_Eric_Chickpea%20mixograph.pdf -- but doesn't hazard a guess as to why.
Then I watched some videos about bakeries in Crete & Turkey that ferment fresh ground chickpeas for 24 hours at warm temps, creating a stinky watery starter that they use to make bread.
All the while, I was meaning to ask why you think the starter degraded so quickly. I've left starter in the fridge without drying it or checking on it for up to 8 months and have never seen mold.
Rob
I also went down a slight rabbit hole trying to find the article I had seen, but with not much luck so far.
I was also surprised with the mold. My completely unscientific hypothesis is that reducing the liquid starter to, in effect, dry crumbs and loose flour reduced the acidity of the starter to such a degree that it became vulnerable to mold and storing it in a sealed plastic container meant there was enough humidity in the environment surrounding it to trigger the mold production. When rehydrated, the starter was almost not sour at all, which gives some credence to the above hypothesis.
Now, why the rehydrated stater produced the sludge, I am a little stumped for an explanation. Yeast-wise it seemed very active, but any gluten was completely destroyed very quickly, even if there was not much acidity still in the taste. Maybe the storage had increased protease levels without the presence of LABs? My limited knowledge of the science around all this leaves me at a loss as to what happened and why, but the small amount of chickpea flour, which I have read can inhibit proteases in bread making, did definitely work to stop whatever was happening.
Hopefully someone who knows more about all this will come along and set us straight!
Interesting Rene. I can offer the following:
Native flour enzymes will do there thing when hydrated with or without microbial activity. LAB generally facilitates and advances this process.
Proteolysis is essentially a reductive process and the by-products of proteolytic action increases the presence of reducing substances (sulfhydryl groups). This is why the effect carries over with consecutive refreshes. Its action promotes itself.
Legume flours are a rich source of lipoxygenase enzymes and counter this process because they are oxidative.
With access to molecular oxygen, lipoxygenase oxidise fats and this leads to the creation of H202 which is natures oxidising agent.
In short, this oxidation leads to the removal of these reducing substances.
I've had several starters I've had to discard over many years' baking for what I presumed was protease activity. I will certainly try some chick pea flour the next time this happens. Thank you. Patsy
Thank you for your explanation Michael. To my untrained mind it sounds completely logical when you explain it.
I now want to see if the starter I've kept in the fridge will work without any further need for chickpea flour when I feed it next to use for baking the next loaf.
A good bit of lateral thinking to try the gram flour; I'm glad it worked so well - it could be a useful part of the breadmaking toolkit for all of us.
Lance