Using Dry Dough (Desem) Sourdough Starter

Desem, or 'dry dough' starter is one of the easiest ways of making sourdough bread at home. It requires substantially less feeding than a regular liquid starter.

However, to establish a desem is a bit difficult from a young liquid starter - many people tell me that they end up with a chunk of odourless dough which, when they use it, doesn't produce outstanding results. This is often because the fermentation they had to begin with in their liquid starter wasn't yet strong enough to handle the change to the dryer environment of a dry dough starter.

For these people I suggest using an established sourdough culture, or to culture their liquid starter for a bit longer (a month or two) before attempting the desem. From experience, a more cultured starter works better for a desem.

If you have already made a desem or dry dough, and have experienced less than acceptable results in terms of rise, I suggest ageing it in the fridge for a couple of months before using it again. It'll keep - simply feed it till it's quite solid, put it in a small plastic container with the lid almost snapped closed, and leave it in a cool part of the fridge for a month or two. You'll find that the outside of the chunk is quite mouldy and possibly dry, but the inside will be a very sweet, gooey mass which is extremely sticky. You just cut away the outside part, discard, and feed the gooey mass with flour straight away. Your starter will now make great bread, and will improve with regular use. Simply maintain the starter in a fairly doughy state, and it will be useable any time.

Shortcuts to Dry Dough success

If you don't want to go through the quite lengthy process of building a mature sourdough culture, there are some commercially available starters (which are based on a liquid in most cases).  I haven't actually seen a commercially or privately available desem starter in Australia except for mine, which you can buy here. You may also have a friend who makes sourdough who will no doubt be happy to share some of theirs with you. A well established liquid starter can be made into a desem starter quite easily. More on that here.

I sell my 21 year old sourdough starters through the website from $25 (including freight to anywhere in Australia). You receive a 300 gram chunk of recently fed dry dough starter in a suitable storage container. You can get white, wholemeal or spelt sent in the mail.

To use it, you just divide the chunk in two, use half in any two kilo dough recipe (most of the recipes in this site work to this size) in place of any other starter.  It's powerful, so one uses less than in liquid starter recipes. The other half can get a small feed of flour and perhaps a little water, which can then be stored in the fridge ready for your next use.

The size of the starter you keep will affect the flavour of bread you make too. A 300 gram chunk will need a total feed of 100 grams of flour and 50 mls of water to replenish enough for a couple of kilos of dough each time. Thus, the ferment is being completely refreshed every two breadmaking sessions.

By keeping a larger starter, say 500 grams or more, and only refreshing the same amount (150 grams), you will keep the starter a bit more mature, because there is a larger fermenting base. You would think that this might lead to overripening starter over time, but if the starter is maintained in a dough state like this, overripening is not really an issue.

Feeding the Ferment

There are at least a dozen ways to make a sourdough starter culture. This site has already covered some of them, and will continue to explore variations, and hopefully provide you with reasonably accurate information - like everything else here, I test ideas out, and when I'm satisfied they are workable, I write and publish here accordingly.

An area of interest for lots of us has been discovering what a starter likes to eat. Like all creative types, home bakers are, if anything, keen experimenters. I get some great stories about what works, and why, so I'd like to share some of them now.

Water

Before I do, though, I'll mention that sourdough starter is at least a third water. Use filtered or natural spring water (the latter is usually best, unless it's very 'hard') to feed your starter.

Some town waters are so full of flouride and chlorine and trace elements (heavy metals for example) that there is enough poison contained therein to seriously retard your fermentation process. Avoid tap water, unless it's filtered, when feeding starter.

If you would like to get a graphic example of how heavily treated town water actually is, put some straight out of the tap into a drink bottle, and close the lid. Leave it for a few minutes, remove the lid and smell the water inside the bottle. You will most likely experience a rather unpleasant smell of chlorine.  If you're not sure, compare the smell to that of a bottle of pure water. A dramatic difference!

Following is a brief list of excellent sourdough starter food, and a brief explanation of what each thing will do to your ferment, as well as how to prepare it, if it requires preparation at all.

Liquid sourdough foods:

• Raisin or sultana water: take a handful of raisins or sultanas, about 200 ml of warm water, and combine. Allow to stand for at least a day. Longer is better, but you need to hold back on allowing it to actually ferment. After a few days, it will begin to form bubbles, and while this is okay at first, if too much alcohol forms, it actually impedes fermentation in your starter. This is because too much acidity hampers the microbial activity you want to encourage in your starter.
• Pineapple juice: this is probably the simplest and most effective means of promoting activity in your starter. Make sure it's unsweetened, though, because sugar will produce different types of enzyme activity - not the kinds we need for sourdough fermentation. Just use instead of water for a few feeds. You will observe a decided increase in activity, as the slightly acid pineapple juice is ideal for sourdough starter fermentation.
• Beer or wine lees: the powdery substance at the bottom of some wine and beer bottles - the lees - is great fermentation food. Just be sure to hold back on the liquid - the alcohol is too strong for fermentation. It's okay to use a bit of the liquid though - just mix it with water.

Carbohydrates to enhance activity:

• Whole grains: sourdough starter loves whole grains, because they have lots of natural yeasts under their skin. The best way to incorporate them is to cook them first very well - till they are over cooked - and then, if you have a potato masher or a food processor, turn the porridge into a gruel. If you don't have these implements, the cooked grain just needs to cool, water and all, and be combined with the starter. Be aware that if you don't turn it into a gruel, the grain will turn up in your bread. This is fine if you are making grainy bread, but not so attractive in a pristine white Continental style bread. I allow my porridge to cool overnight. This also allows a bit of secondary fermentation to occur before use..
• Blanched wholemeal flour: blanching wholemeal flour is excellent to get fermentation going. Follow the directions in the 'Porridge Method'  article. Be aware that the longer you leave the 'porridge' to ferment, the better it is as food for your starter.
• Mashed potato: there are numerous ways to prepare potato for starter, including simply grating it. But if you prepare it first by boiling one in unsalted water, then mashing it without adding anything, it'll work exceedingly well in promoting fermentation. Potato has virtually no protein, and as such is available as food for fermenting greeblies straight away.
  
• Grapes: these can simply be mashed up roughly and incorporated into your starter. Grapes are excellent fermentation food - just be aware that the skins will turn up in the bread. If this isn't your thing, just blanch the grapes and remove the skins first.
• Wholemeal flours: often, we like to make nice white bread, and so we feed our starter exclusively white flours. This is fine; indeed, many bakeries only feed white flour to their starter. But wholemeal flours contain lots of wild yeasts, and as such can really get a sourdough starter active. I recommend a feed of wholemeal flour once or twice a season to enrich and fortify the ferment. It may not be necessary at all, but in my experience this is a kind of insurance policy - regular yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, thrives on white flour. It tends to overrun other types of yeast, so I just do this as a way of reintroducing alternate strains.

Freshly milled grains to use to enhance fermentation activity:

If you have a home flour mill (or an unused coffee grinder even) or have access to really fresh flour (let's just say that buying flour from the supermarket most likely won't be fresh enough),  use this flour or meal to feed your starter - it'll reap instant rewards, I promise!

It's not necessary to do this all the time, just now and again.

• Rye meal or wholemeal rye: even used at about 10% of the total flour in your starter, wholemeal rye will boost the activity substantially. Simply feed as you would using any other flour. The greater the amount of rye in the starter, the more it will flavour your bread. Keep this in mind. I tend touse it every few months in my starter for a feed, though there are plenty of sourdough bakers who disagree with me on this point. My experience has been that immediately after feeding the starter with rye, it grows stronger for the next half a dozen bakes or so.
• Barley meal: another great yeast food. I use this in conjunction with my sourdough starter powder to help get enzyme activity occurring faster. Same as rye - feed occasionally.
• Wheat meal: really coarse, freshly milled wheat meal is just brilliant to get your starter flying along.

• Dry Dough Starter
• Old Dough Starters
• Powdered Starters
• Maintaining a starter
• Storing Sourdough Starter
• Healing Your Starter

Dry Dough Sourdough Starter Method

Dry Dough Sourdough Starter is one for the keenest sourdough bakers among you.

It makes great sourdough bread, with a deep, rich SOUR flavour, which, despite the capitalisation, isn't harsh at all. It's just 'deep', in the same way that a mature wine is 'deep'.

It can be made from scratch, or you can convert liquid starter, or even  a chunk of old dough.

Dry dough sourdough starter keeps for at least 2 weeks between feeds, once established and at the correct consistency.

Liquid Sourdough Starter

Sourdough Starter comes in many forms. A liquid sourdough starter is probably the most commonly used type - and for good reason. It's easy to get established, doesn't require a whole lot of technique, makes a really nice flavoured sourdough bread that isn't too sour, and it's very flexible too. What I mean by 'flexible' is that it can be used in regular yeasted bread recipes as well as pure sourdough ones, because it adds flavour and texture. It's also flexible because it can be rapidly increased or decreased in size to accomodate different numbers of loaves. It can also be fed in different ways to last for longer or shorter periods of time, depending on how often you bake.

So you're about to learn all about Liquid sourdough starter. It's where I usually begin my new sourdough ferments from. You can then also use this starter to make Old dough starter, Dry dough starter (also sometimes called Desem starter) and Powdered (dehydrated) sourdough starter. This last type can be utilised either to begin a starter, to store or share sourdough starter, or to enrich it later on. Sourdough geeks like myself often will maintain a number of sourdough starters simultaneously, to use for making different flavours and types of sourdough bread.

(Note: Old dough is a self contained method, and so the volumes made for dough are different. You can use them with this method here, but just don't reserve any dough. You'll end up with 150 grams more dough per loaf. Not a big deal with sourdough.)