I have always created my own starter. I have started a couple different ones from local flours and I am completely satisfied with them. I occasionally see advertisements for "100 Year Old Starter" or "Oregon Trail Starter", etc. Is there any truth to the fact that these are authentic or is it just a scam?
The Oregon Trail Starter provided by Carl's is legitimate and has been around for many years. King Arthur states that their starter has been around since the 1700s and also is legit.
Those are the two advertised starters with which I'm familiar.
Maybe not quite from 1700: "Ours is descended from a starter that's been lovingly nurtured here in New England for decades".
From another part of the KA site:
Descended from a starter that’s been lovingly nurtured here in New England since the 1700s, our starter has helped generations of bakers make wonderful bread with this same bit of bubbling brew.
Doesn't really matter. Eventually it'll be all yours. I guess you could call it local flora. Enjoy!
I've used https://sourdo.com/ several times after a move.
Thanks for the replies. I guess I might have to give one a try.
It doesn't matter, how old it is. If they dry it and deliver it as dry "powder", then not all original microorganisms will survive the process. When you reactivate the starter you'll create your own microorganisms cultures.
Even if you get it refreshed and at peak, because you feed it with a different flour and you have pretty sure a different feeding schedule (times and temperatures), you have also different microorganisms "in the air", you will get after a few weeks or months your own starter.
Agree with all of the above. Advertising about the age of a starter is just marketing. It's like the axe that's been in the family for many generations, although the handle has been replaced three times and the blade twice.
Every time you refresh a starter it is a new starter. And even as it refreshes, the ratios of various components are shifting around in response to internal dynamics. That is why starter stability is a big deal but nobody knows about it and nobody knows how to measure it. If you can list some significant subset of the various ratios that impact starter propagation you will get a sense of the dimensionality of the problem. What you do determines what you have, though I suspect that under normal replication conditions at home it might take 10 to 20 refresh cycles to yield a significantly different starter. And you will probably notice it too late to fix it.
was quite good, but morphed over time to something different. But still good.