I understand that the microbes in a starter change quite quickly to the microbes in the surrounding environment. I.e. that buying a starter from a distant place doesn’t mean you are getting the terroir of that location. I cannot at the moment find where I read this but I think I’ve come across it several times and that it is sort of common knowledge.
The typical changeover in a sourdough culture moving locations is about one month, assuming regular feeding. As a professional bread baker I am disappointed that this fact is often withheld/obscured by people selling portions of their starters. If there weren't significant location-based differences then, for example, the distinctive San Francisco sourdough flavor could be replicated by sourdough bakers anywhere. Likewise, Puratos—a company generally known for its manufacture and sales of baking mixes—wouldn't maintain a sourdough library, akin to the Svalbard seed vault.
The best reason to acquire an existing sourdough culture would be to start with a healthy, vibrant culture. I think the gain is minimal, both in time and labor. And the person who will typically have a lasting interest in sourdough bread baking is someone who is drawn to the whole process and not after that type of shortcut, especially during the initial learning stages.
I heard that "the distinctive San Francisco sourdough flavor" was due to the water. The Hetchhetchy water in SF has a very distinctive taste. One of the only cities I go to regularly where the tap water tastes amazing
You can buy some of that Lactobacillus species from ATCC: https://www.atcc.org/products/27651 They also sell bacterial pathogens and other things useful for researchers, so that's pretty interesting (at least to me). I never really think about the overlap of food and microbes.
It's also called Fructilactobacillus sanfranciscensis in some places. I can't quickly tell which is the more recent naming and what lead to that change. It's lactic acid bacteria regardless.
Ken Forkish says basically this in Flour Salt Yeast, but I also assume it is relatively well known among the more empirically-minded bakers. In any case the flavors developed in the bread will have much more to do with both the hydration of the dough and the temperature it rises at (as I understand it these will affect the balance of acetic and lactic acid development as well as the CO2 and trace ethanol production in the starter). In Ken's book he asserts that the difference in flavor between sourdough in different places has more to do with local(ly-developed) tastes, recipes, and practices.
My sense is that you would have to be a very practiced (that is, consistent) baker to notice the difference imparted by the possibility culture in your own bread.
My only complaint is that his sourdough starter chapter has you make buckets of the stuff. Maybe it’s supposed to make it more difficult to screw up, I dunno.
His follow up 'Evolutions in Bread' is scaled down for single loaves, either the round or in a bread pan. Including the starter. Also the discard problem is addressed.
That is, to scale a recipe up or down, hold the relationships of ingredients proportionate to that of flour, by mass.
E.g., a typical starter is fed at a 100% ratio: 1 unit of flour to one unit of water. So, 100g, 1,000g, 200g, whatevs. Similarly for your dough, which is often described in terms of hydration. A very low hydration might be 50%, a typical novice dough about 60--65% (excellent for pizza crusts and rolls in my experience), 80% should start giving a very open crumb (with large voids and bubbles), and 100%+ used for high whole-grain flour, or very open-crumb breads. Higher hydration makes for more challenging handling, though with time most bakers develop a feel for this.
There are of course a myriad of other factors, and one of the joys (or frustrations) of sourdough baking is exploring those parameters. My experience is that even my disasters taste amazing, though visual appearances may be less impressive. Amongst those: temperature (hugely significant for both starter and sponge/dough/proofing), proofing time (warm and cold/retarded), types of flour, age of flour, oven temperatures, humidity, and probably a whole lot more. Again, even when things don't go to plan, the results are almost always rewarding. When you do happen to hit the magic balance, it's amazing. My bad batches are still amongst the best bread I've ever eaten.
Good baking books and online guides will discuss this.
I found Forkish's book to be skippable. A lot of that flufftype "writing about thoughts about food" content to increase the length, similar to what you might find on a web log.
A good book on bread is called Bread and it is by Jeffrey Hamelman, published by Wiley.
He understands you might not know anything about bread. All recipes are well-explained and scaled to both the home kitchen and the professional bakery. No web log style writing to waste the reader's time.
I can't really follow your criticism. There is some parts about why he started baking bread. But you can easily discern that from the meat of the book if you don't want to read it.
Then there's an in-depth explanation of the techniques used in the recipes. You shouldn't skip this obviously if you don't know it.
Then there are the recipes which are short and to the point.
And if you read the part about technique you understand bakers percentages and know exactly how to scale it to home kitchen needs, whether you're single or a small family.
> My sense is that you would have to be a very practiced (that is, consistent) baker to notice the difference imparted by the possibility culture in your own bread.
The difference that San Francisco lactic bacteria impart on bread flavoring is obvious and pronounced. It does not take an expert or particularly trained taster to taste. It is a literal mutant strain of the bacteria.
I do agree, however, that this statement is probably true of other regional varieties of naturally leavened breads. Assuming everything else is equal.
From the FAQ: "Could local environmental organisms change the starter? Possibly. Some microbiologists did a study on how stable established strong and healthy starters are and they found that essentially, a strong starter out-competes other organisms in the environment and keeps its characteristics. This is what we have found with our starter. It continues with its characteristics since we have been providing it."
Ah yes, the corruption power of all the money they must be making with that extra $0.05 when they ask to mail $2.00 for an international stamp that costs $1.95...
Let's take (over) 65,000 starts distributed since 2000 on the Carl's friends site[1] - and call it 65k for rounding.
That's 65k starters, with your negative unhelpful comment assuming $0.05 / 5¢ "profit" per starter.
That's 325,000¢ - or $3250 USD "made" in nearly a quarter of a century.
That "profit" discounts 24 years of:
- PO Box rental
- web hosting
- domain fees
- labels and bags for starters to go out in
- envelopes, if the one provided isn't suitable or sufficient
- electricity for refrigeration and freezing of starters
- ingredients for feeding and maintaining the starters
$3250 over 24 years gives a mean of $135 per year -- obviously this will fluctuate from year to year, and costs have risen since the early 00's -- likewise there have probably been more requests as the internet has grown more popular, and the word of Carl's friend spread further.
If you think ~$135 (or even ~$100 on a slow year) is sufficient for everything above -- never mind the time and work donated by the growers and keeper of the mail box -- then you're very much mistaken.
Furthermore, if you think they're being "paid" for their work out of that, your misanthropic and "negative nancy" response, is sorely mistaken.
Of course, all of this presumes that every item is international shipping, and paid for in the "substituted" two $1 bills, or IRC.
1. For US domestic shipping, they just ask for a 63¢ self-addressed and stamped envelope [2]
2. For your profit-implying "they want you to pay them" comment, see:
"Requests sent outside the US require $1.55 US postage *or* substitute two U.S. one-dollar bills or an IRC (International Reply Coupon)" [2]
Note the "or" part -- it's a choice, not a mandate.
Firstly, you can send them what it costs, $1.55, as you like - via PayPal, cash in an envelope, whatever. Their "two $1 bills" option is handy for places like Canada which may have US note currency -- and the IRC is useful in places that don't have US currency in regular circulation.
Secondly, many places don't actually sell international reply coupons any more. While the UPU mandates their acceptance and swapping for postage, they don't mandate the sale of IRCs [3]. For example, Royal Mail (in the UK) hasn't sold them since December 2011 -- therefore requiring the use of PayPal, finding $2 in bills somehow, or sending the $1.95 in change.
If you think Carl's friends have somehow become massively rich over the past quarter-century by checks notes mailing out carefully-maintained 1847 sourdough starter, likely at a loss... please let us know how you've worked that one out.
Where "local environment" is extraordinarily influenced by the flour you feed your starter with.
Which itself is influenced by growing location and conditions, storage, transport, and distribution, etc.
I'd be interested in seeing specific research on how much "wild yeast" and lactobacilli outside of the feeder flour actually influences starter. My strong suspicion is that this is somewhat less than is often considered, if only because of the difficulty of starting one's own sourdough from sterilised flour (bleached), which is to say, being highly dependent on wild yeast.
The other factor I suspect is the evolution of one's own starter culture based on conditions (feed frequency, temperature, flour, storage conditions, light/darkness, etc.) in which it exists.
Unbleached flour can work. It typically takes longer.
Whole meal, or other flours (rye and spelt notably) can really "juice" the process. Rye seems to strongly encourage starter activity.
Mixing even only 1/4 of an alternate (whole meal, rye, spelt) in with unbleached flour makes new starter development much faster, and can also help refresh an older starter.
I moved once, out into a desert area. The microbes in the new environment were so virulent and horrible that my starter was instantly destroyed.
Every new starter I tried would flare up into great bubbles after one day, and would just stink to high heavens after 3. It looked like a great starter, but exuded the most revolting rotten smell.
I tried bleaching all the containers. Changing flours. Storing it in a different place. Nothing. Something out there in the desert was ready each time.
This is true. Just make your own. If you buy one and start feeding it, soon it will be identical to the one you could have made on your own. All it requires is flour and water and time.
Unless you're baking 3+ times a week, it doesn't make sense to keep a constant fresh culture. This is the biggest deterrent to many people getting into it, in fact.
If you want to bake occasionally, you can just refeed after using a portion, letting revitalize to between 70% and peak and tossing in the fridge for 1-2 weeks.
Also, as a side addendum, if you're worried about using your culture at "peak strength", then just avoid the question altogether and just make an overnight preferment of some sort (sponge, poolish) from the culture.
Sure, and I've had lags of days, weeks, or even months in using starter. Too long and you risk mould formation, which I've recently dealt with.
In that case, I ended up starting over from some dried starter which has been sitting in the freezer since April 2020. A tablespoon of that with an otherwise typical feed (100g flour, 100g water), and about six feeds before the starter was back up to desired activity.
"Discard" is a term that's relative to your starter batch itself. There are recipes for discard, one of the simplest is a "starter pancake", which I realised was pretty much a crumpet, and indeed adding about 1/2 tsp salt and 1 tsp baking soda gives the bubbly form of a familiar crumpet. Fry in butter or oil in a small frying pan or using crumpet rings, about 5 minutes per side. To prepare for eating, toast about 3--4 minutes.
These may be eaten sweet (butter and jam) or savory (onions, eggs, tomatoes, etc.), as desired.
There are collections of starter discard recipes.
If you're only baking a few times weekly, storing your starter in the fridge is fine. For longer downtimes, I strongly recommend drying and freezing your starter once established. As I wrote elsewhere in this thread, make backups.
It's also possible to feed daily and store the discard for a weekly batch of discard-friendly recipes (crumpets, English Muffins, sourdough pancakes, and numerous others).
Also to clarify: creating a starter is different from maintaining one.
In the initial stage, your goal is to cultivate yeast in your source flour and/or environment (far more the former than the latter AFAIU), and have them reach a state where your starter is highly active 8--12 hours after a feeding or so. That requires frequent feeding, 1x to 2x daily, for a week or two.
Once you've achieved that goal, your starter becomes far lower maintenance, and typically requires feeding only prior to use and once a week or so as a maintenance process. (I've found I can feed less frequently than this, while refrigerating a sealed jar of starter, but you risk losing the whole batch.)
So, yes, you do need to go through a period of daily or twice-daily feedings initially. But you don't need to sustain that indefinitely.
And again as noted by others, the removeed "discard" starter left over after a feeding can itself be used for quick and simple baking recipes.
(When baking, that "discard" is the levain which you're adding to your dough or recipe.)
I make sourdough pancakes several times per week. This keeps my starter fresh. I don't measure, just an egg, a bit of oil (50-75ml) beat well then add starter until my bowel is around half full (500-600ml) and mix some more. Then disolve a couble scoups (10 ml) of baking soda in water (50-70ml) and mix in. Cook fast.
I use baking powder for this. It works about as well (although you need more of it), but it minimizes the risk of localized areas of too much baking soda, which tastes quite nasty.
I think the idea would be that you only use small portions of the starter, not the whole thing. I'm familiar with keeping yeast cultures for brewing and this seems to be the technique if you are keeping live cultures.
Get your sample, split it up, and keep track of the generations.
The only way you can keep a "pure" influence would be to use the entire sample donated to you by the company (and even then, there will be local influence).
Bread doesn't pick up a ton of bacteria during it's fermentation period, it's the feeding cycle where it will. If you split the culture into many small ones, you're just guaranteeing all of them will be supplanted the moment they're fed.
Sterilize it how? There's inert yeast and bacteria on your flour at all times. That's what allows you to create a starter from scratch. What do you want to do, bleach raw flour every time you're about to drop it in your starter?
I'm sure if you were in a lab environment and absolutely needed to, there are options to do so. But not for most home bakers.
I got some of this years ago - was a pretty good starter, but I'm not sure it is really anything different from whatever starter your neighbor might have available. If you don't have a neighbor or friend with a starter, years ago there was a thread on HN about people making their own starters with good success.
I've made my own! This was 15 years ago or so, in Los Angeles. It was fun as a hobby project; I started a bunch, harvesting wild yeasts from my kitchen, outdoors, etc. A couple turned out pretty yummy, a couple were pretty funky. But recently I bought some dried starter from a well-respected line and have been blown away with how much better the starter we bought is compared to the wild harvested runs I tried. If a friend asked I would tell them it's really not worth it to use a wild strain unless your hobby is microbiology... If your hobby is baking, stick with a known-good starter.
> If a friend asked I would tell them it's really not worth it to use a wild strain unless your hobby is microbiology... If your hobby is baking, stick with a known-good starter.
I really agree with this, given my own experiences, but I will say some of the best bread I ever had came from a chef who started his own at a wilderness camp. Anyone who came out to camp, he would share it, but unfortunately mine went bad after a while.
We got some during the pandemic. My wife went through the “make your own bread” phase with great enthusiasm. (And results!) We’d tend to Carl, our container of starter, and talk about how well it was doing. Then it trailed off and it’s gone to stater heaven. Pity.
The only shipped starter that will ever make a difference is San Francisco starter and that's because there is a literal mutant bacteria in the culture that causes much higher lactic activity than normal. And it'll only make a difference if you use it straight.
All other shipped starters are just a shortcut to going to a local baker and asking for a donation (I've done this dozens of times, all over the world; when I've wanted a fresh/homemade loaf), or just spending a week's time and ~350g of wasted flour developing your own.
There's now quite a sourdough ... culture ... substantially invigorated after the Covid-19 pandemic (xkcd:2296), with books, podcasts, websites, vloggers, etc. I picked up much of my own baking knowledge through these (starting with a few YT videos, and progressing through my own experimentation and further research). I'm still going and just had a couple of slices of my latest batch with eggs.
Starters are startlingly resilient, though you can kill them off or spoil them, largely through heat or prolonged regret.
As any good sysadmin knows, good backups are essential. I'd restarted my batch from a pinch of dough that was proofing in the fridge after one inglorious encounter with a microwave and housemate. After that I dried and froze a batch (King Arthur covers this as well: <>), and a tablespoon of the frozen starter plus about a half-dozen feedings has it going strong again. (This differs from KA's recovery method, but worked.)
Drying another batch to freeze as we speak, can never be too sure ;-)
Using someone else's starter can help bootstrap the process, but your own environment's selective pressures and new sources of yeast, most of whice come from whole-meal flour, which is what you should use to start your own batch. Note that bleached white flour, whilst it can be used to bake or feed however much I'd advise against it, typically lacks any active yeast. I did do some baking with unbleached flour when that was all that could be obtained, and the results while poorer than with unbleached / whole-meal were still quite acceptable, just not my preference.
Burns, Oregon (Carl's home town) and Harney County do not appear on Hacker News very often, but what an amazing place it is.
Recently, it's probably best known for the Bundy family and company taking over the wildlife refuge south of Burns.
But it's well worth a visit for some of the natural attractions, the most prominent of which is Steens Mountain and the Alvord Desert just below it to the east.
Much of it is incredibly remote - the county is more than 10,000 square miles ( 26,490 km2 - more than half the size of the Netherlands and twice the size of Connecticut ) and has fewer than 8000 people.
It's always a lot of fun to see stuff like this on HN. It's a reminder that there are still a lot of fun and amusing things on the internet.
I also love seeing stupid simple HTML sites like this. It's hideous to look at but it serves exactly the purpose it's there to do. It's also really fast.
It’s also easy to make stupid simple HTML sites that aren’t hideous to look at (CSS doesn’t make it slow) that are fit for purpose and are really, really fast. My website is one such example.
I recently introduced my wife to the process of creating a sourdough starter. We created our own over two weeks. I used the yeast and bacteria in the starter to jump start a crock of peppers that I'm fermenting to make hot sauce.
> History Of The Starter? In the mid 1800's the Oregon Trail was the main route west for settlers, farmers, lumbermen and prospectors. The Trail started in the state of Missouri in about the center of the continental US and meandered WNW for about 2000 miles to the Oregon Territory. Other trails branched off of the main trail, SW to Santa Fe and west to California and elsewhere. The Starter came West in 1847 with one of Carl's ancestors who traveled the Oregon Trail to Oregon by wagon train.
> NOTE: Jan 2024: We have been slammed with thousands of requests (20 times the usual amount) so please be patient in the time it will take to receive your starter.
