Don Hellen wrote:

On Wed, 15 Oct 2003 01:45:11 -0600, Samartha Deva
wrote:

IOW, if a starter is really dead, how can it be rejuvinated by any
means?

It can, you just read the right book or web site and it works.

This is an old thread, but I just remembered something that
backs up Samartha's claim.

Well, this was not really a "claim" - it was meant as a parody.

Because....

if you don't sterilize your flour 100 %, anything goes, if you know what
I mean.

And - to sterilize flour 100 % - I mentioned this x times with Ed Wood's
radiation story, tons of rads are needed. Also, I found another instance
where scientists needed some sterile flour to check something out:

""
The experiment was designed to investigate how anaerobic high moisture
storage affects the content of ß-glucan and extract viscosity of barley.
Barley was either irradiated with Cobalt 60 (10 kGray) to sterilize the
grain, or steamed for 10 min and kept at 105°C for 20 min to inactivate
enzymes and sterilize the grain.
""

So - pretty similar to Ed Woods experience and who does that when trying
to "catch" - if not radiation, then steaming and boiling for 1/2 hour?

Also, with an old, presumably dead starter - the organisms may be dead
but their inheritance - acids, alcohol, antibiotics are still there in
that old starter soup, so any newly introduced organisms are immediately
filtered through that screen which is, by the way a rather nasty growing
environment.


There was a shipwreck that had some beer that was about 100
years old.

Someone cultured yeast from the bottle and showed that there
was still some viable yeast even after all that time!

If it's true, it shows that the micro beings can be pretty hardy.

Yehdilediduh

Samartha

--
remove -nospam from my email address, if there is one
SD page is the http://samartha.net/SD/

On Sat, 01 Nov 2003 17:04:58 -0500, Don Hellen
wrote:

This is an old thread

Yet no one seems to have benefitted from it.