Randall Nortman wrote:
> I've been baking whole-grain sourdough bread for years, but due to
> requests by friends I have recently been playing with 100% white flour
> sourdough. I started by converting my whole-wheat starter to white
> flour, using bread flour to feed it because I intended to use bread
> flour (KA brand) to make the actual dough, and I figure I ought to
> feed the starter with the same stuff I intend it to feed on in the
> dough.

Not really - depending how you grow your starter (in a sense, how much
whole graininess you can tolerate in your final bread - 0.1, 1 or 2 %)
you should be able to maintain one kind of starter - the whole grain
type - and use this to grow what you need for your other breads.

> Plus, I figured the diastatic barley flour would help the
> critters break down the starches.
>
> Well, the starter was pretty limp for a few days, but after several
> refreshments it seemed to adapt to the new environment and became
> quite active.

This probably depends on your conditions. I had no problem making white
bread from a small inoculum of a full grain rye starter without going
through extra stages to get the starter going in a new environment.

Now, if I want white bread, I do it in that manner. It works very well.
I currently maintain one FG rye starter by always keeping a small amount
(10 - 20 g) in a small container in the fridge and use that for growing
the next starter. The containers with leftovers I keep for maybe 1/2
year and once and while, I clean up and use their content to make "chaos
bread" - seeing what comes out of it.

> Now, after a couple of weeks of regular feeding it is
> very, very active: When I refresh the starter, I quintuple it (by
> weight: 10g starter + 20g water + 20g flour), and within 3 hours at
> room temperature (about 75F/24C) it has more than doubled, assuming
> the inoculum was reasonably fresh and active already at the time of
> feeding (I've been feeding every 12 hours). Bread made with this
> starter has great volume but the dough rises so quickly that there's
> hardly any time for acid formation and the bread has only the
> slightest hint of sourness.

Punching down should fix that - if you do it often enough, you'll get
sour bricks i. e. over fermented dough.

Another method would be to let your starter get more sour or grow it
warmer to promote LB's. There are growth curves around for hydration and
temperature showing optimal growth for LB's or yeasts for a defined
starter. You (and nobody else here, so it seems) has that. But it's a basis.

> I suppose that might be the holy grail
> for some sourdough bakers, but when I want that kind of bread (and I
> often do!) I just use commercial yeast.

I can't imagine a hard core sourhead having yeast as a holey grail.

> I'm wondering if it might make sense to maintain the starter with
> all-purpose flour instead of bread flour, so that the starter doesn't
> have the assistance of the barley malt and is therefore perhaps a bit
> less active.

There are many ways to go about it. To maintain a starter has a certain
overhead. If that does not matter one may enjoy maintaining a variety of
starters and make a variety of breads.

Another way is to use less variety in starters and vary the starter
growing procedures and bread recipes to get variety if so desired.

The number of possible variations is immense.

> On the other hand, perhaps the starter is so active because I feed it
> so often, and quintuple at each feeding. Perhaps just letting the
> starter go for 24 hours between feedings would calm the critters down.
> This might matter more than the type of flour.

Another possibility is that you may have promoted one organism over the
other with your treatments and that gives you the result you see.

Yet another possibility is that something completely new was introduced.

> Any opinions? What kind of flour do you feed your white starter?

Do what you enjoy most and I fed whatever I used for having around
making white bread, mostly white bread flours (KA, local brand - the KS
contained malted barley, the local brand did not and I didn't add it).

I think the malted barley or not does not matter much with growing a
starter. There are so many factors involved. If you get what you like,
you are fine, if not, you vary some things you think matter and go from
there.

And yes, you may be right, probably a waste of time....


Samartha