August 14, 2024 - 5:00am
Is my starter ready to rock and Roll?
Hi everyone,
After neglecting my good old starter for a bit too long and not paying attention to what was happening, I realised that it had become very imbalanced and acidic. This led me to desperately try deacidifying it (which I had been feeding solely with whole rye flour for a couple of years) for about a week, following BreadStalker's process. Feeding ratio 1:6:6 with AP flour only (Anita's AP 12-15% Protein as per their website)Fed every 12 hours, so twice a day Kept in a proofing box at 22C for the first few days, as per Breadstalker's recommendations, but seeing that nothing was happening (no rise, no sign of life),I decided to amp up the temp to 26C for the last 2 days to try to activate things a little bit, which resulted in a nice rise.Breadstalker does not recommend using whole flour nor higher temp than 23-24C as it can boost the LAB, which we want to avoid, so I'm a bit stuck here... I had never fed my starter with AP flour before, so I have no clue if my starter is now fully active and ready to rock and Roll.... Here is a picture of how it looks 12h after being fed.
I'm a bit confused with the relative lack of bubbles (even if there is some sort of a rise) and the very stringy nature of the dough, which was really not the case when using only whole rye flour (on the other hand I understand that it's hard to compare) Can you let me know what you think? I'm really looking forward to baking again !!Thanks in advance for your insight.Share
It looks good to me. My starter usually looks like this. I think if you'd checked it a bit before 12 hours you would have seen more bubbles, as it looks like it was already passed its peak at this point. I also think it's more stringy just because wheat stretches better than rye.
If it's not ready yet it will be after one more refresh. The sticky stringiness you see is actually the gluten structure of the white flour, so instead of indicating a problem it's a nice illustration.
However ...
12 hours between feeding for an AP 100% hydration starter at those temperatures is just too long (although the listed protein content of your flour seems to put it into the range of a bread flour, not AP, and that's a good thing in this case) for your purpose. Why?
1. The protein starts to break down, and with AP is likely to be fairly degraded by then. Higher protein flour has more protein to break down so it can hold up better, as yours has.
2. As the starter develops, its pH drops (the acidity increases) over time. With a long interval between feedings the starter can get quite acidic. So the newly fed starter begins with a lower pH than desirable but you are trying to raise the pH.
So you actually want to feed the starter more often so that at each feeding it starts off with a higher pH. If you discard and feed the starter too often, then you will have discarded most of the yeast that you have been trying to restore. So there is a happy medium. Fortunately things are not tricky - there is a broad range that will work well.
To illustrate what I mean here is the acidity for a starter of mine after it had missed a feeding. I fed it 22 hours after the last feeding so it started out vry acidic. The data starts just after I fed it. Temperatures were in the range 72 - 75 deg F.
# Time, min pH
0.0 4.2
55.0 4.2
90.0 4.18
160.0 4.15
220.0 4.13
325 4.07
410.0 3.96
465.0 3.96
535.0 3.96
And here is one that that was fed on schedule:
# Time, min pH
0 5.07
65 4.83
105 4.92
210 4.56
245 4.46
340 4.32
390 4.15
480 4.00
Every starter is different in detail but they tend to follow the general pattern. Looking at this data, if I wanted to bring back a good concentration of yeast and also reduce the acidity, I would feed my AP starter every 4 - 6 hours until it stabilized and showed good activity.
If you can't be there to feed it that often, then you can slow down the development. Here's what I have been doing. It lets me wait 10 - 12 hours between feedings:
- Decrease hydration to 90%;
- Use bread flour;
- Add 1% salt.
Remember, this may let you wait longer between feedings but the pH will be dropping during that time. It will be good for 12-hour feedings once you work the extra acidity out but more frequent feedings will be better for raising the PH.
TomP
Thank you so much for those explanations, that is so useful!
Unfortunately I don't have any regular bread flour (at least labelled as such) easily available where I live in Canada, but my understanding is that the AP flour I've been using is considered as bread flour given the protein range mentioned. So I'm quite stuck it, as I don't have any other alternative for the moment.
As for the temp, I can play with any temp range that would be the most suitable as I have a proofing box that can cool or warm depending on my needs.
I think I could find a way to feed my starter twice a day, but what about the 10-11h overnight proof?
For how long do you think I should keep that feeding shedule?
If I feed it twice a day, should I keep the same feeding ratio/temp that I have right now?
Thanks again for your help
I forgot to ask: should I feed it every 4-6 hours even if it has not doubled in size? or any other sign to look for to know if my starter is ready to be fed? thanks!
Doubling in size is one of those rough rules of thumb that can be a good guide to start out with. If your starter were mostly inactive, then no, feeding it too often - especially if you discarded most of the old starter - would just dilute or throw away much of the yeast that is already there.
The pictures you posted are a bit of a puzzle. The bubbles on the top look very good and active, the appearance of the gluten strands when you pulled up some of the starter look good, but the view through the side doesn't show more than a few small bubbles. Also you say it hasn't doubled. Could it have doubled hours earlier, but started to sink since then? The jar doesn't look like there could have been much sinking.
One think that helps a starter get or stay active is to give it a good stirring. That usually causes it to spring to like again even if it had quieted down. For this to work there has to be enough yeast food left, of course, and the starter mustn't be too degraded. Since your flour seems to have the protein content of a bread flour, you seem to have avoided much degradation.
Of course, the real test of a starter is how well it leavens the bread. It sounds to me like you've gone through enough refresh cycles to get it into good shape but against that is the fact that you converted from a whole grain rye to a white low extraction wheat flour. Sometimes a conversion will take longer; apparently the micro-organisms can take some time to adapt to the changes.
Here's what I suggest. To grow the most yeast and hopefully not letting the thing get too acidic, take say 10g of it and put it into a clean container. Feed it 1:4.5:5 with water and flour - 45g water and 50g of flour. Don't get hung up with hitting those ratios exactly. I'm suggesting a 95% hydration instead of 100% because that will slow the fermentation a little and I hope that will fit your schedule better. If that's not an issue than go ahead and use 100% hydration. For fermenting a starter, the exactness of the hydration isn't important.
Let this new mixture ferment for 4 or 6 hours in the temperature range of say 72 - 77 deg F, another figure that isn't critical, and see how it behaves. If it's risen noticeably, good. If it shows some bubbles through the side, good. If those bubbles grow larger over time, good. If the top gets bubbly as in you picture, that's good too.
Then give it a good stir. I use a chopstick for this (not a flimsy little disposable one, a fatter more solid one), but a table knife or anything you have that doesn't have too much area for the starter to stick to will do. This will deflate any growth but that's fine. Check on the starter after a few more hours. If the top looks domed up some and it's been rising, I would say your starter is in fine shape. You could bake with it right now.
Otherwise discard down to that same 10g (roughly speaking, it's hard to be precise) and refeed it the same as before. This next cycle will probably show that's its ready.
Thanks for the very detailed next steps! I am only able to bake on the weekends, so I'll follow your battle plan for the next 3 days and see what happens, and will try to make some bread this weekend to see how things go.
I just fed my starter, so 6 hours after I fed it this morning, and it had not yet doubled in size, maybe +/-50% rise, with happy bubbles on the surface but barely none through the side.
Again, I really appreciate your invaluable feedback!! I'll post my bake here this weekend.
You're welcome and I hope you can get this thing working well. It sounds like it's either there or almost there.
I'd like to emphasize that focusing on precise details is completely unnecessary. It's the process with its progress that counts. One can get there many ways, so it's useful to know the overall picture. Here are some of the general guidelines I know, and others will know more.
1. If you feed with too little new flour, the new material will get used up in a short time and you will need to feed again sooner than you might like. Feeding 1:1:1 or 1:2:2 will fall into this category.
2. If you feed with too much new flour and water, the pH might get raised so high that new organisms can start to grow and get a foothold. You don't want that. I think that 1:5:5 is a good compromise, but there is no exact number that is "best".
3. If your starter gets too old - ages for too long - it will get very acidic. If it contains a lot of bran or whole grain, they will have absorbed a lot of acidity and and make it harder to eliminate. That's why there is some advice about using only white flours when reducing acidity - there will be less of a reserve of acidity.
4. A pH of 4.6 or less is considered to be an upper limit for food safety by the US FDA. You can see from the data I posted earlier that typical sourdough starters will hit this point early to midway through their refresh cycle. That's reassuring.
But that number is wildly conservative. It's lower than the data require (which is 4.8) to provide a margin of safety, and the longer the exposure, the more the target microbes are affected. By way of comparison to the sourdough, I mixed a poolish of flour and instant yeast, and its initial pH was 5.6 and it didn't drop much below that. So over the times we are interested in, a pH higher than 4.6 works out all right. But 4.6 is even better.
I don't mean you have to measure the pH. I only want to give a sense of how I've seen it acting in typical sourdough use.
5. If you take a very acidic starter and refresh it, the refreshed starter will start out more acidic that if the starter had been less acidic. So if you keep letting a starter age way too long, chances are that over time it will get more and more acidic. This might inhibit the yeast as well, leaving you with a sour starter with low activity. Each cycle will tend to increase the acidity until the system settles into a more-or-less weak, acidic state.
6. Conversely, feeding an acidic starter before it's gotten too acidic will let your starter get less acidic over time. Eventually it will settle into a state where the acidity is moderate and the yeast is flourishing.
I hope that you can see that what's important is your approach and not the details. That's what I'm trying to get across with all these words.
TomP
I think I'm starting to get the big picture, yes; and indeed I had completely lost sight of that for a long time, letting my starter getting more and more acidic without even realising it and wondering why my loaves were gummy, dense and no oven spring, to name just a few characteristics of a weak starter...I thought is was a BF issue and fighting on the wrong front! I was so sure that my starter was on autopilot and had found its cruise speed, that I lost sight of the obvious! Lesson learned :-)
I've been thinking of getting a ph meter for a long while, and might take that opportunity to finally take action!
I got a pH meter as a gift this year. I found it interesting, but I don't use it day in and day out. I haven't found, for example, that there is some particular value of pH at which bulk fermentation or proofing is done. It's the patterns of pH, and their extreme values, that have helped me to picture what's generally going on. These measurements made it clear to me that a starter (or dough) will get more acidic as it develops after mixing, and how I could inadvertently walk my starter into a very acidic condition without realizing it.
If you're thinking about measuring pH for baking, you might consider trying out some pH paper before purchasing a pH meter. I use a narrow range paper that makes it possible to see approximate pH values of starters and levains. To use the paper, I smear a small amount of sample on the paper, wait 10–15 s, and scrape off as much as possible to view the result. I find that I can readily discern the approximate pH of a sample without the expense of the pH meter and supplies (buffers and storage solution).
I frequently used a pH meter in a chemistry lab on reaction mixtures that were not clear sample solutions. Despite my best efforts, I found it difficult to maintain the pH probes in these applications and often had to purchase new probes. I have not used a pH meter designed for measuring dough to know about its durability, but the maintenance of the pH probes should be a consideration in any purchase decision.
I'm partly red-green colorblind and I could never make litmus paper work since I couldn't reliably match the shades.
The Harris probe that is designed for dough seems to be doing well so far.
Do you have a link to the meter? I'm familiar with the Hanna meters but not the Harris. I have occasionally thought about getting a pH meter to measure TTA of starters, levains, doughs, and baked breads. I have tried titrating using phenolphthalein as indicator but I find that the darker mixtures from rye, especially, tend to confound the endpoint determination. I've had a lot of experience with titrations and the TTA one has given me fits, possibly even worse than a Fajans chloride titration endpoint (the Subway cup in the video is a definite no-no in the lab). The pH meter should make the TTA endpoint easier to determine.
Yes, interpreting pH papers can be a challenge, but I find the narrow range papers do make it a little bit easier, but can't eliminate the red-green issue.
Sorry, mind blip, I meant Hanna.
I've read mitigated opinions about those ph papers and ph meters as well and am still not sure what route to go yet.
But nothing urgent; for the moment I'm just focusing on trying to reactivate my starter, that doesn't seem to be willing to yield without a good fight...Still no sign of bubbles in the body of my starter today, and a very timid doubling-in-size in 12h last night, kept at 26C. I fed it 1:5:5 early this morning, and 5 hours later it had barely risen a very shy 1/4 when I gave it a stir...It's so puzzling! We'll see tonight
Ph varies - depending on who ya read - so don't bother. Just keep it thick till it thins out - add more to thicken and wait. I should add - if ya haven't followed my directions - disregard. Enjoy!
One thing that has bit some people is a change in their water. It's probably best to use filtered water rather than plain tap or well water, for example. Some people have found that bottled water helped them, but not necessarily all brands. Besides, that can get to be an expensive nuisance.
I thought of that, too, and was considering using filtered water for a while...Pfff, it's getting more and more complicated !!!:-///
I wonder if I shouldn't start building another starter altogether as this one is starting to give me bad headaches!
As @Davey1 pointed out, you can get by without measuring the pH. I got the pH paper because I wanted to monitor rye levains because you can't always go by expansion there. I wanted to ensure that the pH had dropped to or below pH 4 because rye needs the low pH to prevent runaway amylase activity ("starch attack").
The paper is inexpensive enough that you could take a flier and try it out. One roll has lasted over three years. And the narrow range paper lets you get a decent approximation for the pH, which is probably all you need for this application.
Said like that, it totally makes sense indeed...I'm sold! I really need a way to know what's happening in there, and that paper sounds like a good start! I will try to bake some bread this weekend anyways to see what happens and will see if can get my hand on those papers asap.
Would you have a link of the right type of paper to use to share as this is really uncharted territory for me? Thanks in advance
If you have any questions about the pH paper or its use, feel free to send me a PM through The Fresh Loaf.
I certainly will!!! Thanks a lot! I just checked my overnight levain, and it beautifully rose...YESSSS!!! Let's get cracking :-)
Here are the 2 loaves of the day, using my salvaged starter...Not too bad!!! I think I could have pushed the BF a bit longer, but at least there does not seem to be any sign of starter imbalance, which is a huge relief.
My starter now nicely doubles, if not more, in size in 12 hours at 24C, with lots of nice bubbles at the top, even if not that much at the sides, but if it works like that, so be it!
I now have to find the magic formula to keep it cool (10C) during the week without letting it becoming too acidic.
I will receive the ph paper mid-week, and will contact you at that point if I have questions (and I will!)
Those look as nice as anyone could hope for. Way to go! I especially like the looks of that S-shaped slash.
For holding that starter for the work-week, do the things I suggested earlier:
- Use bread flour;
- Reduce the hydration a little;
- Salt the starter (1% salt works well for me);
Expect to get it ready to go after a single refresh.
TomP
That was my starting plan :-)
I was thinking trying a 1:10:10 ratio?
I forgot to include the lower hydration in the ratio; so let's say 1:8:10??
I don't have a specific suggestion here, just that a high ratio might be too high in practice. Maybe start at 1:6.5:8, maybe. If you could refresh once during the week that would be ideal, but I think this will work all right. If you can get the pH paper working then you will be able to see if the acidity is dropping or rising over time. Here's the kind of numbers you might see for a series of refresh cycles (don't take them very literally - they are just for illustration):
pH just before refresh pH just after refresh
4.2 4.8
4.2 4.8
4.1 4.7
4.0 4.5
3.9 4.4
3.9 4.4
3.9 4.3
3.8 4.1
This is a starter that's slowly getting more acidic. It sounds like your own starter may have followed this path.
Or it could follow a reverse path. It's also possible to drive down the LAB (and so the acidity) while still keeping the yeast healthy. That leads to breads that rise well but don't have much flavor.
Remember that these pH paper readings are probably not going to be all that precise, so don't go by any little variations or wiggles in your readings. It's the trend over time that matters.
I don't know if it's just luck but most starters seem to reach a happy medium and stay there. It's not going to be a disaster if you mess up the feeding schedule a time or two.
TomP
I'll refresh it midweek then, no problem: how does it work? Shall I take it out of the 10C and feed it right away or wait until it reaches peak ? (but it could be anytime during the day; mind you I could take it at work with me!)
This whole ph thing is still a bit mysterious to me, but I think I get the gist of it and that I need to focus on the trend; looking forward to it!!
You can feed it with room temperature water and that will take the chill off. I think the refreshed starter should get a chance to get fermenting before it is stored away, at least a few hours. I don't have a definitive answer here and you will have to do a little experimenting. Perhaps you could refresh it after work and put it away later in the evening (or whenever it is).
If the storage temperature were a little colder - my refrigerator is around 36 deg F/2C - I'd say leave it in all week and refresh it once to wake it up and reduce acidity, then one more time so you could bake with it. You mentioned 10 deg, so it's warmer than I have first-hand experience with.
Sorry I just saw the link to the ph papers in your previous message! Thanks again