So I have been reading Breads From La Brea Bakery and she suggests for a starter to use organic grapes to help the starter get going because the bloom on the outside will help kick start some fermentation. So my question is this bluberries seem to have that same kind of bloom on the outside ant it is I would assum from things in the air so would they be an acceptable substitute for grapes in her starter I like blueberries and I also think organic bluberries might be a little easier to come by this time of year.
The easy thing that is widely recommended for getting a starter going is to add some whole grain rye or wheat to the starter in the early going. The idea is that the right organisms are living on the grain and will be introduced to the culture. Any flavor of blueberry or grape would disappear from the culture very quickly as you feed and therefore dilute any original ingredients with regular flour and water, so unless there is something particular and different about the organisms introduced by the grapes or blueberries that remains stable in the culture, the flavor of the culture is probably not going to be much affected by them.
She mentions in her book that you can use regular grapes, you just have to wash them. My preference was for organic grapes but they didn't have them at my HFS at the time so I bought conventional grapes. Of course, 2 days after making my starter, lo and behold, organic grapes were on the shelves.
But if your goal is simply to get a starter, I'd recommend using SourdoLady's starter instructions. You'll use a lot of flour with the La Brea method, and it's a bit messy to boot. Not that it won't work, but SourdoLady's is about as foolproof as it gets, and it also won't require a truckload of flour to get it going.
I've used grapes to make a starter, I used a 1/4 cup of flour and hand squeezed the juice out of 200 grams of grapes and adding skins and seeds to the flour, then adding enough water to make a smooth paste. Every day add 2 T flour and enough water to keep up the paste. On the 4th day I strained out the skins and seeds, and baked with it 2 days later.
The grapes make for a more alcohol starter especially with whole wheat flour, very bubbly, foamy, and volatile.
Let us know how your starter turns out.
Hey JIP
If grapes are hard to find just use organic raisens. I think 1 cup of raisens in 2 cups of tepid water (not to warm. Soak for an hour, strain out raisens and add to flour. This is how Reinhart does it in his crust and crumb book. Good Luck.
Da Crumb Bum
Yes, it was the recipe she recommends that everyone start out with. The Country White.
I'm pretty new to this stuff, this is my first homemade starter so I'm not sure how much help I can be. However, Nancy recommends switching to a different starter after the 2 week period, when the starter has been fully developed. It makes sense since you really don't begin feeding it until Day 10 - you've only fed it once, on Day 4 previous to then. Although you could probably experiment and split your starter around Day 10, keeping one white and the other rye.
I don't know if you read what she wrote, but she mentions that if you aren't making rye bread on a regular basis, to build a new starter every time you want to bake (white starter + feed it rye flour for 3 days before baking). She mentions that you shouldn't keep rye starter dormant in the fridge for more than one week.
Come to Ontario where all I can find is dark rye flour. It's nearly impossible to find rye chops or pumpernickel. And now a friend in Saskatchewan just sold her rye crop to Bob's.
These catch-22's are too much!