Healing Your Sourdough Starter
From time to time, starter gets a bit out of balance. Either a bit too acid, or a bit too alkali. Mostly, this comes as a result of neglect, but it can also come about from the home baker not being able to read the starter correctly.
People sometimes 'over feed' their starters, and it can end up with this process being the remedy as well. Often, they'll just throw it out and start again. I advise against this course of action, due to the simple fact that the essence of a starter doesn't ever die - it just gets out of balance. By throwing it out, you are throwing away the flavour you want to get by making sourdough bread in the first place!
Symptoms:
Starter smells funny. There might be a crust on top of liquid, sitting on top of goop. Or even worse - it's just this crust, with a super sticky goop, no liquid at all, because you've let an 'old dough' sourdough starter get away. These are thick to begin with, and stay that way for a long time.
Diagnosis:
 Quite possibly, the acid/alkali balance in your sourdough starter is out of whack. This happens when you don't feed it, and the micro culture of yeasts, bacteria and fungi and enzymes begin to break the structure of the food (flour) into its component parts, liquid, solid, and waste. So, for an inaccurate but useable analogy, it has become either too acid or too alkali, depending on how long it has been neglected.
Remedy:
Remove the waste. First, remove the crust on the top. It makes an excellent food for compost heaps, in that soil cultures actually feed on it, and it acts as a compost nutrient by increasing microbial activity in the soil.
Break it up before you put it in the compost - it will convert quicker.
Then, if there is any liquid, pour off the 'hooch', which is the mildly alcoholic liquid underneath or on top of the crust. If there is only a small amount of hooch liquid, this step is not necessary.
 If you work with dry dough sourdough starter, or desem starter, or old dough starter, you will have seen a starter which looks like the one in the photos, after many months of neglect. These come back very well indeed, after removing the crusty outer layer. The inside, as the photos show, is thick and creamy old dough sourdough starter, ready for use. I made the most sensational brown rice and wheat sourdough with the very piece in the photos, and it worked a treat, straight up.
Here is a chunk of the crusty stuff sliced from my old dough starter. This became a family of worms' multiple lunches.
Feed the starter with two parts flour to one part water. This is a thick mixture. It will help to stabilise the sourdough starter, and create a slightly different balance of enzymes. By thickening sourdough starter, it does become slightly more sour in taste. However, this can be offset by using less as a proportion of the flour weight in recipes.
You should aim to roughly double the total volume of the starter you have, and thicken it at the same time. This is a visual thing. You don't need scales for this.
Method
 Here is a step by step breakdown of how to feed and reinvigorate 'rediscovered' (inert, mouldy, half dead, whatever you want to call it) Sourdough Starter:
Add warm water to the starter, and stir the starter through the water with a wooden spoon. You might need to break up the cleaned starter with your fingers so it disperses through the water.
Then add flour, a scoop at a time. Keep adding until you've got something resembling a very wet dough, and begin folding in the flour. I just run my fingers through the dough like a rake until it starts to clump.
Then, as it begins to thicken, turn it in using your spoon or the fingers of one hand. You should end up with something you could knead.
 A bit of kneading, also with one hand is good - but not too much. This just expels the excess acid to get soaked up by the fresh flour in the mix.
If you do not have the space in your container for this extra volume of starter being created, this is the time to start a second starter container, the same size as the first. This will accomodate the extra ferment - allowing you to run a liquid ferment parallel to the old dough one. (This gets easier to do, and more interesting, as you slowly transform into a total bread geek. More on this later. You're already here, though).
Divide the dough in two and distribute into the two containers. 
Put them away in the fridge overnight.
Finally, after this feed has softened (which is generally after a day or two in the fridge) use the whole of one of the mixtures to make a dough (see below).
Leave the other in the fridge to ferment slowly.
You can also turn one of the containers into a liquid sourdough starter again, and keep the other to ferment as 'old dough'.
Making the dough for the 'Old Dough' method:
Take the thickened sourdough starter, and aim to double it in size.
You'll need:
- A large bowl or plastic box big enough to get both hands into.
- Enough water to cover the starter to about half its existing height in the container.
Stop Press: SourdoughBakerShop now sells these really handy boxes, as well as a whole host of other useful plasticware and home bakery utensils online. Or, you can buy a Bakery in a Box, which has everything you need to get started baking home made sourdough bread fast. These kits all include enough Powdered Sourdough Starter to begin with sourdough, and printed instructions, recipes and free samples of useful things!If you need fresh Organic Flour, or other ingredients, check out the Ingredients Supply section.
We can usually get your order to you anywhere in Australia within three working days of received payment.
Method:
Push your fingers through the water and into the dough, making deep indentations.
Scoop by scoop, add flour and push through the water into the dough using your fingers.
 Gradually it will become a dough, and you can start to knead it with both hands, adding more flour as you go, until it's at a fairly tough consistency.
Allow to stand for an hour, and reserve a chunk of about 300 grams to make your next dough.
Put the chunk in a small plastic container with a loose lid, and return to the fridge.
This piece of dough won't be ready for about a week. 
This 'old dough' will be used completely in every dough you make with it, so you need to remove only enough old dough to be useful for your typical bake. For example, I use mine in two loaves at a time, so I only need to keep 300 grams of old dough starter in the fridge. This saves fridge space, and I can use it any time I want. If I don't use it for months, it's usually OK to make bread with anyway.
Once you've reserved your chunk of dough, the remainder will need to be weighed. As a rule of thumb, the salt component of a dough should be about 1%. So if your dough weighs two kilos, you need to add 20 grams of salt. Knead it in till you can't feel it in the dough any more.
Note: If you know that your old dough starter will be used only very occasionally, simply reserve (cut off) your chunk from the next dough you make after you have added salt to the dough. The salt that goes into the old dough will just help it to hold longer between feeds.
(Sometimes you'll have excess sourdough starter from this process. If you want to do something with this excess can be used in a variety of ways. Two upcoming recipes I'm working on are:
These are two things I have often made to utilise surplus sourdough starter. They are very addictive recipes, I promise!). If you can't wait for my recipes, go ahead and experiment!
Replenishing your Liquid Starter:
The second container of sourdough starter can become your regular liquid starter again, so after a few days, use half of the starter in a dough (which is similar process to making the old dough explained above. Or you can visit the recipe section and find a recipe tp use it in.
Feed the second container of sourdough starter with one part water to one part flour.
After you have finished, you should have about the same amount of starter as you had before you made the dough in the previous step.
This container of liquid sourdough starter can be used as little as once every ten days or so, and will still be very tasty in bread.
However, if the starter ferments too quickly between uses, progressively thicken the mixture until it goes the distance you need it to between uses.
Maintaining your liquid sourdough starter:
It's important to maintain this second container of sourdough starter at a volume that suits the amount of bread you bake.
If you are baking every couple of days for a large family with teenagers who seem to nothing other than eat and sleep, for example, you might want to keep a few kilos of sourdough starter, using only small, frequent feeds to keep it capable of making bread in a shorter period of time.
Or, you may just be baking for yourself, once a week or less. In this case, you only need to maintain a kilo or less of starter, with a feed once a week after making bread.
Making sourdough starter seems complex at first, but it's one of those things that is harder to explain than to actually do. I can only suggest you persevere, and remember that what you are doing is creating a space for life to happen, which is quite a different thing to baking bread. That comes later.
There are more articles here for you to have a look at. Check out some of the following - so much, to read, so little time:
For more information about Sourdough Starters, follow the links below by title:
Don't forget to visit the SourdoughBaker Bookshop for more great recipes and information to feed your brain as you embark on your sourdough journey.
If you need fresh Organic Flour, or Powdered Sourdough Starter, or perhaps a Bakery in a Box to get the whole thing going properly at home, visit SourdoughBaker Shop while you're here, and check out our bulk prices and easy delivery options.
Happy Sourdough Baking!
|
