How surprising to find this here. I've just started making sourdough bread. It turns out that I can't make it like the local bakery, but actually, that's fine. I had to really think? Do I like open crumb? Actually no! I want sandwich bread.
I've been exploring what I can get away with. Leaving the bread to rise overnight on the counter? Yep. It's fine. Leaving the starter for 2 days instead of feeding every day when it lives on the counter. Sure - no problem. Knock it back or just quickly shape. Doesn't matter. Bake at 1.5 or 2 or 2.5 the size. It doesn't matter enough.
Things that are not fine, shaping the bread, leaving it to rise in the oven which is on a timer and then the oven turns off but I'm not back for an hour to take it out. Crust too dry!
Your mileage may vary of course. But sourdough just seems so much more forgiving than a fast acting yeast.
I've yet to see if I care about a difference between a proper knead after the first rise or just a quick shaping. It's quite fun trying the different possibilities.
In my household we have "Starterday" for Friday - when the starter gets fed, "Riseday" for Saturday - when the dough gets kneaded, shaped and left to rise, and finally "Bakeday" for Sunday, when the bread goes in the oven early in the morning. A 1.5Kg loaf usually lasts until next Bakeday for both me and my partner.
I will assume most people reading this are already sourdough bakers - but if not, baking sourdough can be extraordinarily simple, easy and cheap - give it a go!
All you need to flour and water to make your starter, and a little salt for baking. I've got my (BakeWithJack style) process down to about 10 minutes (across 30mins) in the morning, 12 hours proofing, a few folds then into the fridge for 12 hours, then bake. A loaf lasts us 2 days and I can do the dough or bake while getting the kids ready for school.
My wife offered to get some sort of bread machine, but it is the process that I love as much as the bread (same as brewing beer).
I'd like to add one piece of advice that I don't see very often.
You tend to see pictures of sourdough starters in big jars. But you don't need a big jar! A tiny amount of starter is enough to get going.
Each time you feed it, the size multiplies, so you can start with a teaspoon of starter and make enough for a big loaf in just a day or two. When I'm in a bread-making routine, I keep like 10g of starter. One feed brings it up to ~50g, another feed to ~150, and that's enough for a loaf (saving 10g for next time).
If you keep your starter in a big jar, it'll just go to waste. Keep it small and you'll never need to throw any away.
On more than one occasion, I've made sourdough pancakes or something, and forgotten to save some of the starter. The tiniest scraping of uncooked batter from a leftover spoon is enough to keep it going -- just mix it with flour and water and the magic happens.
Totally this! I was using huge jars when I first started and making massive levain - now just 10g in a jar, 50g water and flour as you say and it is good to go.
The other thing I'm surprised people (by which I mean makers of youtube videos) seem to worry overmuch about is feeding the starter. Everyone gets out the scale and has some view on ratios - 20g flour to 35.23g water or whatever.
Put a heaping tablespoon of flour in the starter, add enough water to make a paste, stir and you're done. Not enough water? Add a bit more. Too much water? Meh, add a bit less tomorrow.
> If you keep your starter in a big jar, it'll just go to waste. Keep it small and you'll never need to throw any away.
I tend to make «sourdough discard crackers» if I have leftovers. It works well timing wise, I'm in the kitchen doing the initial stretching of my loaf anyways.
The only thing that's tough is the timing. It's gotta sit for an hour before slicing, which means if it's to be ready for school lunches it has to go in the oven at 5:30.
It is one of my life hacks: when I know I can/have to bake in the morning I find it much easier and much more enjoyable to get up at 0500.
(Before I used two alarms, one that could only be defused with a barcode next to the sink on the bathroom + an (un?)healthy dose of self discipline. Now I enjoy it.)
I'm not sure what brown flour is - at least where I live in the US that is not something I've ever even heard of before.
I know that our whole wheat flour is sometimes bleached. This doesn't change the color (much?), but it kills a number of nasties and thus makes raw flour safer. (you should still never eat raw flour, but if you do bleached is safer... I know many people do eat raw flour, but there are some things can can hurt/kill you if it isn't cooked). I'm not sure if whole wheat is what you mean by brown flour or not.
Agreed - though before I baked I thought sourdough was complex process that likely needed stuff I didn't have to hand, and assuming getting a starter would require and Etsy order.
I bake 'normal' bread on occasion but since we all prefer sourdough and it costs so much in the shops for good sourdough, it is my go to.
If you don't like sourdough, you don't need to make sourdough!
Use baker's yeast instead. That doesn't limit you to basic recipes -- there's a vast range of interesting stuff you can bake. You'll usually need to make a preferment with flour, water and yeast (a "poolish" or "biga") so the overall routine is very similar to sourdough.
Unfortunately ‘sourdough’ has come to mean two things: on the one hand it is a general term for all wild starters; on the other it is a particular term for actual sour bread, most particularly that made from a San Francisco starter which spoiled in the 19th century.
Like you, I find the latter really quite unpleasant (to the point that I really am surprised anyone willing eats San Franciscan sourdough). But wild starters can range from tasting just like ordinary commercial yeasts, to tasting similar but with a richer flavour, all the way to the funk that we both dislike.
I have never had a San Franciscan sourdough in Europe, so I doubt that this sourdough is the nasty (to my taste — many folks love it) kind, but maybe there is some subculture of inedible (again, to my taste) European breads. More likely, I suspect that this is just a good wild starter.
I use a mix of bakers yeast and a wet (1:3) starter/sourdough. Just 2g yeast/kg flour makes a huge difference, even with 150 g starter.
My wet sourdough is 1 part flour to 3 parts water. As noted in a sibling comment, this favors the sour parts (lactic acid?), but compared to a dry starter, there are significant advantages the the starter/yeast combo:
1) Feeding the wet starter takes 10s: pour flour and water onto leftovers and stir quickly with a spoon. No sticky stuff to deal with.
2) The starter seems exceptionally stable, maybe because of the water layer: I only wash my starter jar every two or three months, and the 10g or so that I put back in the fridge after starting a dough, will last for weeks and consistently restart overnight when fed
3) Being able to independently adjust yeast-levels in a predictable way, means that I can easily play with sourness levels and adjust leaving times when I have to match the timings with other activities.
There is the downside, of course, that I need to keep bakers yeast in the house as well...
sourness is depending on quite a lot of factors - amount of water in starter, how long you proof, temperature etc.
I also prefer less sour breads and since I started using a stiff starter it's much better than more liquid ones. I still haven't found the perfect recipe yet but it is possible.
You can. Twenty years ago "sourdough" didn't mean the finished bread was particularly sour. But people's expectations have changed, maybe because of the name. And it's easy to let the bread get very sour if that's the goal.
You don't have to make bread. My current favorite thing is sourdough English muffins, but King Arthur has a whole list of recipes that use the sourdough discard. The sourdough pancakes are excellent, especially after you drown them in maple syrup.
It's the resource I shared the most with friends who asked me how to bake sourdough breads, even though I didn't learn the basics from it I really like his style of teaching, concise and thorough at the same time.
The worked up my own process below through seeing what worked for my flour and starter:
100g sourdough starter
300g water (cold and filtered)
12g fine sea salt
10g olive oil
550g white and brown bread flour mixed (I use 200g brown, 350g white)
Morning of the day before (24 hours), or on the night before (12hours) you will bake:
Feed the sourdough starter 50g brown bread flour and 50g water. Make sure that this is at least 12 hours before you plan to make the dough, allowing time to double in size and form a very bubbly starter before using.
Morning:
Measure 100g of bubbling sourdough starter into a bowl, add 300g cold water and whisk with a fork for 1min. Add 12g salt and whisk briefly again until the salt is dissolved.
Add 10g olive oil and 550g flour and stir until all flour is mixed in, at least 2 mins of mixing. Use your (wet) hand to complete the mix.
Leave for at least 5 minutes then gently lift and fold one corner of the dough into the middle, rotate the bowl 1/4 and repeat. Fold the dough 4 times then cover and leave for 15 mins and repeat the folding, before one final folding 15 mins later, before leaving to proof for the rest of the day.
Proofing:
Cover the dough, let it proof (rise) for 10-12 hours at 16-19c in the kitchen. It only needs to double in size - you don't want it to over proof.
That evening:
Shape. Check your dough, and when it has almost doubled in size, it is ready to stretch, fold, and shape.
Wet your hands, and bring the dough in from the corners of the bowl, then reach in from each side and lift up the dough in the middle, letting it stretch down front and back. Let it stretch for 15 seconds, then fold these two dropping sides over itself, turn the bowl and repeat until folded this way 4 times.
Shape roughly into the loaf you want, onto a lightly floured parchment-lined bowl - if your shaping has formed a seam, put the seam side up and pinch it closed. Cover and this in the fridge overnight.
The next morning preheat the oven to 225c - if you have a cast iron pot add this to the oven to pre heat with the lid off.
Remove the proofed loaf from the fridge, and add any cuts or slashes to the loaf before baking.
Place the loaf (still on the parchment paper) into the cast iron pot, cover and bake for 20-25. Remove lid, and bake 10-15 more minutes, until very deeply golden. For my oven total baking time is 35 mins, 25 covered and 10 uncovered.
Remove from the over and the pan, then remove the parchment paper. Let it cool on a rack for at least an hour before cutting.
If you don't have a cast iron pot you can bake in two roasting trays placed face to face, or you can bake just on a baking tray, uncovered - if so add a small pour (20ml) of boiling water to the base of your oven, every 10 mins for the first 20 mins (at start, at 10mins,and at 20mins).
I must say that making my own starter, and making pizza from this.. incredible. It has been a very fun and fulfilling journey. It is better than going out for me and I now have it dialed in to where I can crank out 12 pizza in an hour from my oven. We have friends over and it’s a great time. The dough I feel like is also well adapted and suited to my particular environment and the flour I bake with and there is something unique in that this culture you can only get from me and my house
Yeah, the sourdough my wife and I bake now is so fine-tuned that we haven't had better sourdough from anywhere. Indeed the sourdough pizza is insanely good! We make crackers, pancakes and waffles with the discard. Oh and chocolate chip cookies... freakin' glorious.
We did the Tour du Mont Blanc hike (170km/105mi) last summer over 8 days, and we took one of our sourdough starters to let it take in the different particulates in the air all over the alps. Whether it makes a big difference or not is hard to say, but it was a fun way to hopefully bolster the "diversity" of the starter's makeup. It is indeed a very strong starter that we get great results from. I would have been really curious to submit it to this study, had I the chance, because we've taken it all over the place now!
> I wonder what might happen if I was to feed it twice a day at room temperature for a month or so.
If that S. cerevisiae is from accidental contamination from commercial yeast, it'll probably stay dominant. Commercial yeast is a bit of an overachiever.
Temperature matters though. You only really see San Francisco style sourdough cultures, with L. sanfranciscensis cooccuring with K. humilis yeast, in bakeries that regularly backslop at room temperature and never use commercial yeast. That's not easy for most home bakers.
In the first image ("How old is [Stinkie] compared to the other mumble mumble* starters?"), the cumulative age distribution mostly falls off as you might expect, but it looks like there's a very noticeable bump about 4-5 years ago. I guess people in Europe were making pandemic bread too.
> the uniqueness of your starter is defined by the local climate, local flour, and the way you feed it to keep it alive. The weather in Greece is much warmer...
How's that for a startup idea: 23andMe, but for yeast. So 16andMe I guess.
Seriously though, I love stuff like this, and wish biotechnology services were more accessible for regular people. Probably not much of a market, though!
As far as the starter and discard, they are "twins". You can divide them into even smaller lots and have quadruplets, octuplets or whatever. Adopt them out and everybody's happy.
My wife always keeps a bottle of discard in the back of the fridge. Sometimes we accidentally kill the main starter, and it can always be revived from this backup.
> reverse is true for that twin in Finland where rye is more predominant than wheat
Calling yield of 26 mtons predominant over 869 mtons[1] seems like an exaggeration and maybe barley was meant instead of rye? Or I'm misinterpreting something.
Knowing Finns, I'd wager that they mean rye flour is used more for bread than wheat flour. They're not talking about general production of flour, but usage in bread.
How surprising to find this here. I've just started making sourdough bread. It turns out that I can't make it like the local bakery, but actually, that's fine. I had to really think? Do I like open crumb? Actually no! I want sandwich bread.
I've been exploring what I can get away with. Leaving the bread to rise overnight on the counter? Yep. It's fine. Leaving the starter for 2 days instead of feeding every day when it lives on the counter. Sure - no problem. Knock it back or just quickly shape. Doesn't matter. Bake at 1.5 or 2 or 2.5 the size. It doesn't matter enough.
Things that are not fine, shaping the bread, leaving it to rise in the oven which is on a timer and then the oven turns off but I'm not back for an hour to take it out. Crust too dry!
Your mileage may vary of course. But sourdough just seems so much more forgiving than a fast acting yeast.
I've yet to see if I care about a difference between a proper knead after the first rise or just a quick shaping. It's quite fun trying the different possibilities.
In my household we have "Starterday" for Friday - when the starter gets fed, "Riseday" for Saturday - when the dough gets kneaded, shaped and left to rise, and finally "Bakeday" for Sunday, when the bread goes in the oven early in the morning. A 1.5Kg loaf usually lasts until next Bakeday for both me and my partner.
I will assume most people reading this are already sourdough bakers - but if not, baking sourdough can be extraordinarily simple, easy and cheap - give it a go!
All you need to flour and water to make your starter, and a little salt for baking. I've got my (BakeWithJack style) process down to about 10 minutes (across 30mins) in the morning, 12 hours proofing, a few folds then into the fridge for 12 hours, then bake. A loaf lasts us 2 days and I can do the dough or bake while getting the kids ready for school.
My wife offered to get some sort of bread machine, but it is the process that I love as much as the bread (same as brewing beer).
This guy made baking really simple for me https://www.bakewithjack.co.uk/videos
I'd like to add one piece of advice that I don't see very often.
You tend to see pictures of sourdough starters in big jars. But you don't need a big jar! A tiny amount of starter is enough to get going.
Each time you feed it, the size multiplies, so you can start with a teaspoon of starter and make enough for a big loaf in just a day or two. When I'm in a bread-making routine, I keep like 10g of starter. One feed brings it up to ~50g, another feed to ~150, and that's enough for a loaf (saving 10g for next time).
If you keep your starter in a big jar, it'll just go to waste. Keep it small and you'll never need to throw any away.
On more than one occasion, I've made sourdough pancakes or something, and forgotten to save some of the starter. The tiniest scraping of uncooked batter from a leftover spoon is enough to keep it going -- just mix it with flour and water and the magic happens.
Totally this! I was using huge jars when I first started and making massive levain - now just 10g in a jar, 50g water and flour as you say and it is good to go.
The other thing I'm surprised people (by which I mean makers of youtube videos) seem to worry overmuch about is feeding the starter. Everyone gets out the scale and has some view on ratios - 20g flour to 35.23g water or whatever.
Put a heaping tablespoon of flour in the starter, add enough water to make a paste, stir and you're done. Not enough water? Add a bit more. Too much water? Meh, add a bit less tomorrow.
> If you keep your starter in a big jar, it'll just go to waste. Keep it small and you'll never need to throw any away.
I tend to make «sourdough discard crackers» if I have leftovers. It works well timing wise, I'm in the kitchen doing the initial stretching of my loaf anyways.
Yeah I just use a wide mouth pint jar. Stays in the fridge until I feel like making something with the starter.
The only thing that's tough is the timing. It's gotta sit for an hour before slicing, which means if it's to be ready for school lunches it has to go in the oven at 5:30.
Yep.
It is one of my life hacks: when I know I can/have to bake in the morning I find it much easier and much more enjoyable to get up at 0500.
(Before I used two alarms, one that could only be defused with a barcode next to the sink on the bathroom + an (un?)healthy dose of self discipline. Now I enjoy it.)
Unbleached flour. My attempts at making starter failed until I got unbleached flour.
Brown flour is brilliant, and already has plenty of wild yeast in it.
I'm not sure what brown flour is - at least where I live in the US that is not something I've ever even heard of before.
I know that our whole wheat flour is sometimes bleached. This doesn't change the color (much?), but it kills a number of nasties and thus makes raw flour safer. (you should still never eat raw flour, but if you do bleached is safer... I know many people do eat raw flour, but there are some things can can hurt/kill you if it isn't cooked). I'm not sure if whole wheat is what you mean by brown flour or not.
To a first approximation, nobody eats raw flour.
Flour is cooked in a pan with fat to make a roux; a roux plus broth can become gravy.
Flour is cooked in a pan with liquid to make pancakes or crepes.
Flour is cooked in an iron to make waffles.
Flour is cooked in an oven for baked goods.
Who do you know who eats raw flour, other than by accident?
It’s not really substantially different priced than yeast based bread baking
Agreed - though before I baked I thought sourdough was complex process that likely needed stuff I didn't have to hand, and assuming getting a starter would require and Etsy order.
I bake 'normal' bread on occasion but since we all prefer sourdough and it costs so much in the shops for good sourdough, it is my go to.
I just wish there was a way to make it taste less ... sour.
If you don't like sourdough, you don't need to make sourdough!
Use baker's yeast instead. That doesn't limit you to basic recipes -- there's a vast range of interesting stuff you can bake. You'll usually need to make a preferment with flour, water and yeast (a "poolish" or "biga") so the overall routine is very similar to sourdough.
Unfortunately ‘sourdough’ has come to mean two things: on the one hand it is a general term for all wild starters; on the other it is a particular term for actual sour bread, most particularly that made from a San Francisco starter which spoiled in the 19th century.
Like you, I find the latter really quite unpleasant (to the point that I really am surprised anyone willing eats San Franciscan sourdough). But wild starters can range from tasting just like ordinary commercial yeasts, to tasting similar but with a richer flavour, all the way to the funk that we both dislike.
I have never had a San Franciscan sourdough in Europe, so I doubt that this sourdough is the nasty (to my taste — many folks love it) kind, but maybe there is some subculture of inedible (again, to my taste) European breads. More likely, I suspect that this is just a good wild starter.
I use a mix of bakers yeast and a wet (1:3) starter/sourdough. Just 2g yeast/kg flour makes a huge difference, even with 150 g starter.
My wet sourdough is 1 part flour to 3 parts water. As noted in a sibling comment, this favors the sour parts (lactic acid?), but compared to a dry starter, there are significant advantages the the starter/yeast combo:
1) Feeding the wet starter takes 10s: pour flour and water onto leftovers and stir quickly with a spoon. No sticky stuff to deal with.
2) The starter seems exceptionally stable, maybe because of the water layer: I only wash my starter jar every two or three months, and the 10g or so that I put back in the fridge after starting a dough, will last for weeks and consistently restart overnight when fed
3) Being able to independently adjust yeast-levels in a predictable way, means that I can easily play with sourness levels and adjust leaving times when I have to match the timings with other activities.
There is the downside, of course, that I need to keep bakers yeast in the house as well...
sourness is depending on quite a lot of factors - amount of water in starter, how long you proof, temperature etc.
I also prefer less sour breads and since I started using a stiff starter it's much better than more liquid ones. I still haven't found the perfect recipe yet but it is possible.
A good intro into the difference of starters is at the bread code: https://www.the-sourdough-framework.com/Sourdoughstartertype...
You can. Twenty years ago "sourdough" didn't mean the finished bread was particularly sour. But people's expectations have changed, maybe because of the name. And it's easy to let the bread get very sour if that's the goal.
Proof then bake soon after - I find the sour flavour develops more the longer I leave it to rest in the fridge.
Get a bread machine if you don't like the sour taste.
Or bake a basic no-knead loaf. I would mix the dough in the morning and bake it in the evening.
You don't have to make bread. My current favorite thing is sourdough English muffins, but King Arthur has a whole list of recipes that use the sourdough discard. The sourdough pancakes are excellent, especially after you drown them in maple syrup.
Thanks for the link. It has hundreds of videos though. Any specific videos you’d recommend to get started and to fine tune it?
As an alternative, I can recommend Hendrik's "The Bread Code": https://www.the-bread-code.io/
He has a very simple beginner's recipe on his YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msqU-ylXWUs
It's the resource I shared the most with friends who asked me how to bake sourdough breads, even though I didn't learn the basics from it I really like his style of teaching, concise and thorough at the same time.
Hey,
Try this series from him that is a great intro: https://youtu.be/vmb0wWKITBQ?si=S3MVF8qyKLOuCHmq
I was then inspired by https://youtu.be/ZxCf39G_7pY?si=Mf5dfcZIngyXCuEY
The worked up my own process below through seeing what worked for my flour and starter:
100g sourdough starter 300g water (cold and filtered) 12g fine sea salt 10g olive oil 550g white and brown bread flour mixed (I use 200g brown, 350g white)
Morning of the day before (24 hours), or on the night before (12hours) you will bake: Feed the sourdough starter 50g brown bread flour and 50g water. Make sure that this is at least 12 hours before you plan to make the dough, allowing time to double in size and form a very bubbly starter before using.
Morning: Measure 100g of bubbling sourdough starter into a bowl, add 300g cold water and whisk with a fork for 1min. Add 12g salt and whisk briefly again until the salt is dissolved. Add 10g olive oil and 550g flour and stir until all flour is mixed in, at least 2 mins of mixing. Use your (wet) hand to complete the mix. Leave for at least 5 minutes then gently lift and fold one corner of the dough into the middle, rotate the bowl 1/4 and repeat. Fold the dough 4 times then cover and leave for 15 mins and repeat the folding, before one final folding 15 mins later, before leaving to proof for the rest of the day.
Proofing: Cover the dough, let it proof (rise) for 10-12 hours at 16-19c in the kitchen. It only needs to double in size - you don't want it to over proof.
That evening: Shape. Check your dough, and when it has almost doubled in size, it is ready to stretch, fold, and shape.
Wet your hands, and bring the dough in from the corners of the bowl, then reach in from each side and lift up the dough in the middle, letting it stretch down front and back. Let it stretch for 15 seconds, then fold these two dropping sides over itself, turn the bowl and repeat until folded this way 4 times.
Shape roughly into the loaf you want, onto a lightly floured parchment-lined bowl - if your shaping has formed a seam, put the seam side up and pinch it closed. Cover and this in the fridge overnight.
The next morning preheat the oven to 225c - if you have a cast iron pot add this to the oven to pre heat with the lid off.
Remove the proofed loaf from the fridge, and add any cuts or slashes to the loaf before baking.
Place the loaf (still on the parchment paper) into the cast iron pot, cover and bake for 20-25. Remove lid, and bake 10-15 more minutes, until very deeply golden. For my oven total baking time is 35 mins, 25 covered and 10 uncovered.
Remove from the over and the pan, then remove the parchment paper. Let it cool on a rack for at least an hour before cutting.
If you don't have a cast iron pot you can bake in two roasting trays placed face to face, or you can bake just on a baking tray, uncovered - if so add a small pour (20ml) of boiling water to the base of your oven, every 10 mins for the first 20 mins (at start, at 10mins,and at 20mins).
Iterated from these instructions (with videos of the folds) https://www.feastingathome.com/sourdough-bread/#tasty-recipe...
I must say that making my own starter, and making pizza from this.. incredible. It has been a very fun and fulfilling journey. It is better than going out for me and I now have it dialed in to where I can crank out 12 pizza in an hour from my oven. We have friends over and it’s a great time. The dough I feel like is also well adapted and suited to my particular environment and the flour I bake with and there is something unique in that this culture you can only get from me and my house
Yeah, the sourdough my wife and I bake now is so fine-tuned that we haven't had better sourdough from anywhere. Indeed the sourdough pizza is insanely good! We make crackers, pancakes and waffles with the discard. Oh and chocolate chip cookies... freakin' glorious.
We did the Tour du Mont Blanc hike (170km/105mi) last summer over 8 days, and we took one of our sourdough starters to let it take in the different particulates in the air all over the alps. Whether it makes a big difference or not is hard to say, but it was a fun way to hopefully bolster the "diversity" of the starter's makeup. It is indeed a very strong starter that we get great results from. I would have been really curious to submit it to this study, had I the chance, because we've taken it all over the place now!
> I wonder what might happen if I was to feed it twice a day at room temperature for a month or so.
If that S. cerevisiae is from accidental contamination from commercial yeast, it'll probably stay dominant. Commercial yeast is a bit of an overachiever.
Temperature matters though. You only really see San Francisco style sourdough cultures, with L. sanfranciscensis cooccuring with K. humilis yeast, in bakeries that regularly backslop at room temperature and never use commercial yeast. That's not easy for most home bakers.
In the first image ("How old is [Stinkie] compared to the other mumble mumble* starters?"), the cumulative age distribution mostly falls off as you might expect, but it looks like there's a very noticeable bump about 4-5 years ago. I guess people in Europe were making pandemic bread too.
* I can't read Dutch
> the uniqueness of your starter is defined by the local climate, local flour, and the way you feed it to keep it alive. The weather in Greece is much warmer...
There's actually a word for this: terroir - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terroir
How's that for a startup idea: 23andMe, but for yeast. So 16andMe I guess.
Seriously though, I love stuff like this, and wish biotechnology services were more accessible for regular people. Probably not much of a market, though!
I thought there was millions of different kinds of bacteria and yeast inside a sourdough, in fact there are only a few..
As far as the starter and discard, they are "twins". You can divide them into even smaller lots and have quadruplets, octuplets or whatever. Adopt them out and everybody's happy.
My wife always keeps a bottle of discard in the back of the fridge. Sometimes we accidentally kill the main starter, and it can always be revived from this backup.
Calling Romania Greece is US levels of geographical ignorance. Impressive.
> The graph shows five different vertical bars
Actually 6
"Five different bars containing unique combinations of typical sourdough classes, with the sixth bar being the combination of your own starter."
This is a brilliant company idea! So happy it exists.
This caught my eye:
> reverse is true for that twin in Finland where rye is more predominant than wheat
Calling yield of 26 mtons predominant over 869 mtons[1] seems like an exaggeration and maybe barley was meant instead of rye? Or I'm misinterpreting something.
[1] https://vyr.fi/app/uploads/2024/01/inengl_1ca381b_Production...
Knowing Finns, I'd wager that they mean rye flour is used more for bread than wheat flour. They're not talking about general production of flour, but usage in bread.
Ah, that would make more sense. But even so, wheat seems to be three times more popular than rye: https://ruokatieto.fi/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Tietohaaruk...