On Sun, 23 Nov 2003 14:22:19 -0700, "Mike Avery"
> wrote:

>It's been a while since I read Dr. Wood's book, but as I recall he
>sterilized his flour with intense radiation and then started many, many
>cultures in Egypt to try to re-create the bakeries and cultures used in
>the time of the pyramids. And most of the cultures failed. And he's an
>expert.

I believe he published 2 books. The one you refer to was the first and
the one I refer to was the second. In the latter book he ducks the
issue of flour-based organisms. But he does give a valuable clue that
I have never seen anywhere else, namely the requirement for
freshly-milled organic whole grain wheat flour.

I tried several packaged flours with no success, but got almost
instant activation from bulk flour I bought at Whole Food Market. An
employ said they turn that particular flour every week so it is about
as freshly-milled as I could find.

>It's a question of probabilities. Darrell has the relative denisities of
>microorganisms in the air, on grain, and in a starter. The lowest
>density is in the air by many orders of magnitude.

That is very interesting.

>Grain has to be coddled along to start a starter.

Not that freshly-milled starter. It activated as though I had
innoculated it with commercial yeast. There was no hesitation or
ambiguity that that starter was a powerhouse as soon as water hit the
flour.

>And then, of course, you're also in
>Houston, a petro-chemical hell.

Somebody has to make the gasoline for your SUV. We make like about 80%
of the nation's unleaded fuel and the additives that go into it.

I, fortunately, live on the diagonal opposite corner of the City, well
away from the refineries and chemical plants. However, I have always
imagined that if an airborne starter was activated, I would end up
with some kind of petroleum derivative.

>There's no telling what you have in the
>air there. But most of it probably isn't alive.

You don't know our air. There is a poem about one of the cities near
the refinery complex named Pasadena, Texas:

"Beautiful downtown Pasadena, where the air is greener."

>I think the key may well be "not exposed to the (Houston) atmosphere".

I am a good 50 miles from the chemical complex and my backyard faces
an expanse of woods (I live on the county line in the NW sector of
Metropolitan Houston. You would think those woods would produce all
the yeasts I could ever want.

>> Why not lace the starter with some buttermilk or yogurt?

>There are recipes that use yogurt as part of the process, but it's similar
>to the situation with regards to using bakers yeast or grapes to start a
>starter. You get organisms, but not the right ones. After a while they
>die off, and the right ones take over.

>Dr. Gaentzle, another German sourdough researcher, says that all the
>sourdough cultures he's tested, worldwide, wind up having a strain of
>Lactobacillus Sanfranciscus in them. He has *NO* idea where they
>come from. This has some impact on the "you can't make San
>Francisco sourdough anywhere but San Francisco" theory.

If the wheat itself is the major source of organisms, by orders of
magnitude, then SF starter is not indigenous to SF. It is the product
of the kind of wheat that people use in SF.

>> Pity.

>The picture may be worse than I painted it. There are, of course,
>people with vested interested in making sure that more is not
>understood about sourdough. If anyone could demonstrably make SF
>sourdough anywhere, that would really impact the revenue stream for
>Boudin and the other SF bakeries.

I wish I knew a microbiologist so I could send him a sample of my
"natural" starter - the one I got going with that freshly-milled
flour. If he discovered that the LB is SF, then that would prove the
point you raised.

Of course, Boudin has bakeries in
>New Orleans and Chicago, and they claim the results there are the
>same as in SF. Perhaps it's because they ship cultures and flour to
>the other bakeries.... in any case, not many existing sorudough
>bakeries would be interested in funding research.

Even more carefully guarded are the yeasts used in brewing. Wouldn't
it be ironical if all these organism were essentially the same.

If the truth be known, I get all the sour taste I want from a
poolish-based bread made using commercial yeast. But I want to be a
member of the sourdough cult so I can brag about running the gauntlet,
and therefore I labor over jars of starter, feeding the damn things
like they were my last meal.