My Daily Starter Feeding Procedure for 23°C Temperature (From Italy)
Hi everyone.
I'm Sandro from Italy.
Here there is how I feed my sourdough starter two times at day.
Well, I use the "Camaldoli sourdought". I have bought it from Sourdoughs International.
I store it at room temperature and I feed it so:
9.00Am--> I take 20 grams of old sourdough and add 50 grams of water (fountain not bottle) and 55 grams of strong flour. Mix well and put the mixture at 23°Centigrade for 12 hours.
9.00Pm--> About at the 8.30Pm the starter is start to deflate. At the 9.00Pm the Ph of the starter is 3.62. I take 20 grams of old starter and add 50 grams of fountain water (Ph7.73) and 55 grams of strong flour and mix well. The Ph of the starter became 5.01. And I think that this is the best ph value for the lactobacilli growt. After I put the starter at 23°Centigrade for other 12 hours.
The next morning I use the same procedure of above.
And this is my daily procedure for maintain my starter.
Regards from Italy and best whishes for the Christmas days ;-)
Sandro, that sounds like a good routine to me. Within a couple of weeks your sourdough will no longer be of Camaldoli, but of wherever you live. The yeast and bacteria of your region will become the natives in your culture.
It is worth mentioning to anyone starting sourdough, that it takes a few weeks also to develop all the heterofermentative bacteria that will be adding flavor to your bread. Be patient!
Keep up the good routine and show us some of your bread!
Soundman (David)
Hi Soundman.
I live at about 37 miles from Camaldoli Hill. Camaldoli Hill is in the Naples Area.
I use my Camaldoli starter only for make pizza, and after I bake it in the fired wood oven at 400°centigrade.
The Camaldoli sourdough is a really great sourdough.
One of these days I would like to load on YouTube the video about my pizza with the sourdough.
Have a nice day and I give you my best wishes for the Christmas days.
Regards from Italy.
Hey, Sandro!
Regards from New Haven, Connecticut! (Pizza capital of the U.S.!)
So you live close to where your sourdough comes from. Perhaps it will maintain itself close to the original. One day you can go up to Camaldoli Hill with a little of your starter and compare its smell and taste to their starter!
Where I live, there are several pizza makers who brought back, from Napoli, around 1900, the secrets they learned in the old country. They make their pizza in wood-fired brick ovens (and never let the fire go out except in August when they go on vacation). I would love to see a video of you making your pizza, that would be so cool.
Let us see some of your pizza!
Soundman (David)
Hi David :-)
I would like to go in Naples area for compare my sourdough with that of the other Neapolitan pizzerias. The problem is only one:
The Neapolitan pizzaman or baker are not particularly happy to speak about their sourdough... They keep their secrets from generation to generation. The father give his experience only at the son. It is really hard to find somebody that teach you about the sourdough... They simply "Don't know" :-(
Today only a few pizzerias in the Naples area used the sourdough. Most of them used the "Lievito di birra" (Beer yest).
When I load on YouTube my sourdough pizza I call you. This is a mine promise.
Regards from Italy
I watched your video of rehydrating the Camaldoli starter. Very funny, like watching bread rise :) I'm sure it was full of good information. I see it got twice as many hits as the one of '30 minutes in the refrigerator', where the only word I could pick out was 'hootch'. I also watched the video of the toy helicopter flying around. I saw a big backyard, and a dog, but no oven. We would love to see your oven in action. By the way, my calculation of the overall hydration of the dough is 54% (520.5/960.5), rather than 59%.
Ed Wood said the Ischia starter came from a baker who gave it to the young man who also captured the Camaldoli.
I have a theory, totally unproven, that you could capture some sourdough microbes by exposing a sterile medium to the air in a bakery or pizzeria, or perhaps even from the wrapping that the bread comes in (paper, plastic). Or maybe downwind from the exhaust vents on a hot summer day. Or maybe just dust from a shelf in the bakery. We're behind you on this.
Hi Leucadian.
I think that the real ratio of water in my dough is 57%. I have checked and correct it.
I'm not too strong in math :-(
I usually view the oil as a "liquid", so I add it at the water.
For exemple: If I have 1000 grams of flour that absorb the 60% of water and I use the 3% of oil I use this proportion:
1000 grams of flour, 570 grams of water and 30 grams of oil.
I have try to add the oil over the water (1000 +600+ 30) but the dough became too sticky, and when I enlarge my disk at 33centimeters I have some problems.
P.S. the second video of sourdough show it after 30 days (and no minutes) in the refrigerator.
I think that your theory about the capture of the sourdough microbe, can be work
oh yes...
One of these days I load on YouTube one video about my sourdough pizza and after I call you.
Regards from Italy.
I've heard this multiple times, that the original culture is soon overwhelmed by local yeast, and I have a hard time believing that it's due to geographic dislocation. I know that this is commonly accepted, and I believe Hamelman calls his sourdough Vermont instead of SF for this reason, ditto for David with his San Joaquin SD.
My problem is this: in my case at least, there is precious little chance for airborne yeast to get into my starter. It's kept in the refrigerator, covered, all its life except when I scoop out a teaspoonful to start a new batch of bread with. And, of course, when I refresh it every month or so, but even then it's covered, and as often as not, resides in the microwave while it is fermenting.
Even if there were a fair number of yeast spores in the air, I believe that they would be far outnumbered by the active, stable population in the mother starter. I think a far more likely suggestion would be that the yeast in the flour might contaminate my original culture, but that's not what is being proposed. If it were, then the issue would be to find flours with the desired flora already in them, and that doesn't seem to be anyone's theory, except for creating a brand new starter. Even then, I haven't heard anyone say that a particular brand of flour was superior, but rather we're encouraged to use material which probably has a rich population of yeast already on it, like grapes, rye, or wholewheat.
I believe that what leads to change in a culture is the environment (temp, hydration, nutrients, pH) that it experiences, factors that encourage certain microbes over others. Starting with a grain based starter, where there are probably many different yeasts, the final population would be determined by how the starter is treated in its infancy. In the case of starting with a certain (pure) strain of yeast, like Sandro's Camaldoli, if he could eliminate foreign (to his starter) yeasts, he should be able to keep that starter true to its roots. Along those lines, I always thought it strange that there seems to be no effort to sterilize the medium before adding a purchased yeast to the flour when making a new starter. I have a sneaking suspicion that my own Camaldoli is actually a native yeast contained in the flour I used to rehydrate the dried yeast.
Do we have any flour/grain microbiologists in the audience, who would be willing to comment?
I just re-discovered this article,
http://discovermagazine.com/2003/sep/featscienceof
The author even quotes Hamelman. BTW I think Hamelman is great, and I own and bake from his book. I just dispute his microbiology.
Sandro, please tell us more about your pizza dough (flour, hydration, % starter, and so on). Maybe you should try to capture your own wild yeast?
Hi Leucadian.
This is my recipe for make 6 balls of 250grams each one. 250 grams is the Neapolitan standard.
In my dough I use the 57% of water. ( This ratio included the olive oil because it is liquid ).
Well. 3.00Pm I take 371.5 grams of active starter (formed by 195.5g flour and 176g of municipal water a ratio of 90%) and add:
344.5 grams of water
26.5 grams of salt (2,8% on the flour)
28.5 grams of olive oil
765 grams of flour.
Total:
176g of water in the starter + 28.5 grams of oil + 344.5 grams of water in the dough = 549 grams of liquid
195.5 grams of starter flour + 765 grams of flour in the dough = 960.5 grams of flour
Mix all the ingredients and the time is became 3.30pm
After 30 minutes of rest (at 25°c) I form the 6 balls and after I put all them at the temperature of 25°C for the final rise.
At the 8.30Pm, the balls are exactly doubled in volume. I enlarge the disk of dough at about 30-33centimeters and after I bake them in my wood fired oven at the temperature of 400°c for more than 90 seconds.
I keep the flames in my oven at low level, so the crust have the colour of the "gold" and it is not dark and there aren't bubbles.
In the past I have to try to capture the wild yest, and I have captured it, but it was not strong yeast, so my starter have not the strength to rise :-(
The sourdough is formed by two microorganisme (wild yeast and lactobacilli). When you try to capture them, nobody can give you the certainty that you have captured both them...
The doctor Ed Wood of sourdoughs international have tell me that in my camaldoli starter there are yeast and lactobacilli, and I believe in this because my starter have a good perfume of yogurt (lactobacilli) and it rise very well (wild yeast).
Hope that this can be help you.
Ciao ciao -->Bye bye :-)
Hi Leucadian. I'm happy to write with you again :-)
The sourdough culture are characterized by organisms that have become dominant over extremely long periods of time with symbiotic relationships that are difficult to distrupt.
The lactobacilli produce an antibiotic that protects the culture from contamination by harmful bacteria, and this strong mutual dependence is to be responsible for the survival of the culture when it is used in other areas.
I have two cultures:
1) The Camaldoli sourdough
2) The San Francisco Sourdough
And these two cultures are really differents in the perfume. I have bought the San francisco sourdough about 3 years ago, and it have always the same perfume. It is not changed.
Are these the answer at your questions?
I hope to have understand your question.
Regards from Italy.
the amounts and % of salt in the pizza recipe and correct by using the "edit" at bottom of caption. I can't swallow 28% of flour.... that would be almost a third! 2.8%? That is still very salty!
Thank you Mini O.
I have correct the wrong.
What do you think about my method?
Regards from Italy.
Hi, Sandro,
I'm here in Italy, in Monte San Savino in Tuscany, and I have been making bread the past few days because I like my bread better than the bread I can buy here. I know there is good bread here, just none that I've found. I have also started a sourdough culture from gaarp's tutorial on this site. It is ready to make bread. Here's my problem: I can't figure out the flour! I have several-farina di grano tenero tipo 2, farine con germe ci grano tenero tipo O, garina di grano tenereo tipo 00, farina integrale, semola di grano duro, and farina 0 manitoba. I think that the last three are for bread baking and the others are for cakes or cookies. Correct?
I made one decent yeasted loaf out of tenero flours by adding a mixture of rolled oats, rice, farro, etc., (after soaking), but I didn't knead it much. Then I tried making a loaf with a 2-stage biga and kneading it, and the structure fell apart. Tonight I have a yeasted bread that looks pretty successful, but it didn't rise as much as I expected.
Can you help me out?
Molto grazie!
Patricia