July 10, 2007 - 9:59am
rye starter
does anyone keep a seperate rye starter for baking or do you just use a regular white starter for making your rye bread? i'm reluctant to keep 2 separate starters to feed full time. is it possible to convert a portion of my white starter to a rye starter a few days before baking and use that as a substitute? the bread recipes i'm concerned about that call for a mature rye starter are in the Hamelman bread book under the 3 stage ryes. any advice from folks that are familiar and baked the 3 stage ryes would be welcome.
david
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Somewhere in the Hammelman 3-stage rye section he reports that he discussed this topic with a professional German rye baker, and the conclusion was that it doesn't matter what the starter is fed on as long as it has a good taste. Feeding it an overwhelming percentage of rye in the freshening and first sour phases will make it as rye-ey as any other starter. I feed my starter with a white/whole wheat blend and it works fine for rye.
sPh
that's a good point sph. come to think of it the recipe only calls for something like a Tsp of starter to begin with so it shouldn't make that much of a difference when you build it up with rye flour for the next 36 hours after that. have you made the 3 stage ryes and found them good? i'm trying to build my way up to the 100% rye recipe in stages so i can get a sense of how it mixes as i increase the percentage of rye. i'm at the 66% rye now. very sticky and messy compared to white dough.
david
> have you made the 3 stage ryes and found them good?
I have made some of the 3-stage ryes from that book, but I haven't gone above 50% rye percentage as my goal is to make a freestanding sandwich loaf rather than a pan loaf. At some point (probably when I have a large enough pan) I will try taking it to 80 or 90 percent rye.
All the variations I have tried have turned out very well.
sPh
David, After messaging back and forth with Samartha who Is well versed in the Detmold-3 stage rye starter, I decided to just start from scratch and build up a genuine Rye starter. It only took 2 feeds to get activity and by the end of the second day it was perking along just fine and smelled great. That rye must have all the right germs and food. I could have converted my white starter which I considered but I am trying to create a stable authentic rye starter that will work with AP flour, rye or WW. If your starter is healthy and vigorous I don't think it matters much how it was started.
What I'm starting to wonder now is if Rye just has an abundance of what we have been growing with the AP starters. If you are using small inoculations of when building up the levain, I don't think you would see the rye particles if you looked. I'm not a bio-chemist (but my niece is) and I would really like to know if it matters from which species of grain the LB comes from.
Eric