Re:Carl Griffith's 1847 Oregon Trail Sourdough Starter
by bluGill on Saturday February 10, 2024 @07:40AM
(#39325750)
Unpleached flour is easially available in the stores where I live. That is how I started my starter this summer.
Re:Carl Griffith's 1847 Oregon Trail Sourdough Starter
by dredmorbius on Saturday February 10, 2024 @08:20AM
(#39325941)
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.
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.