Mastering Your Sourdough Starter - A deep dive into Flavor and Acidity

in today's video you will learn about acidity of different sourdough stutters and how you can use your sourdough studies to your advantage improving the taste and texture of your sourdough bread understanding this crucial piece of knowledge is going to make you a better baker and you can already see in my background i prepared my whiteboard so let's science this your sourdough stutter is a magical symbiosis of yeast lactic acid bacteria and acetic acid bacteria now what they are producing is ethanol that makes you tipsy co2 that makes your bread fluffy lactic acid that makes it sour dairy notes and acetic acid that provides you vinegary notes so you typically start feeding your sourdough stutter you add a bit of flour and a bit of water plus typically a bit of your previous stutter now at the start of everything the yeast is way more active the yeast produces a lot of ethanol and a lot of co2 your dough starts to increase in size the bacteria starts to notice this the bacteria consumes the ethanol plus other sugars that now become available because you mix flour and water suddenly your dough starts to become more sour the yeast stops to work as much the bacteria becomes more active at some point the yeast becomes dormant and can't continue to ferment the dough you feed the dough again the same thing happens one more time from the start and this is a really great chart that young peter and me have been developing it shows you how the dough increases in size with different temperatures marked as the dotted lines then the continuous lines they show you how the acidity develops now the ph the more sour something gets the lower the ph becomes at some point the level of the dough starts to become steady afterwards the level of the dough will start to decrease as the dough becomes more and more unstable at the same time the ph keeps decreasing and decreasing the dough becomes more sour ultimately the ph will also level out as there are no more nutrients now let's do the same thing but with a liquid starter a liquid starter is a starter that's very high in the water amount the regular stutter is typically one to one flour and water the liquid stutter is one part flour five parts water what happens is your starter no longer produces acetic acid because acetic acid requires oxygen you'll be making a star that has a lot of dairy notes i like this kind of flavor now we're going to make a dough again with our liquid stutter a sourdough stutter is pretty much just a gigantic dough so let's assume for a second that this is also a dough this is a dough made with a regular sutter we're gonna make one now with a liquid solder and another one with a stiff stutter again we are making a dough and a dough at some point probably starts here and then it increases in size and this is where it gets very interesting at the same amount of volume increase the liquid starter dough is going to be more sour than the regular dough so here we might have a ph of maybe 4.2 ph indicates the acidity here it could be something like 4.0 3.9 so at the same volume increase we made the dough that's more sour and this is something really cool to learn because in a more liquid environment the lactic acid bacteria seem to thrive not so much the yeast and to finish this off let's have another look at a dough made with a stiff stutter again we are making a dough a stiff studder typically has a hydration of 50 you have two parts flour and one part water it's a very stiff stutter that's where the name comes from now the dough made with a stiff stutter at this level of volume increase is going to have a higher ph than the dough made with the regular stutter and the liquid stutter so this dough here is the least sour of them all at this given volume increase and this is something that's super fascinating and very good to know because the bacteria that you have inside of your dough they are also eating the gluten network of your dough and this is why sometimes when you make a dough and you let it ferment for too long it becomes very sticky a mess it doesn't increase in the oven in size anymore and that's because your bacteria likes to eat the gluten which is actually a good thing it reduces the overall gluten in your dough now at this level here because the ph is higher we haven't created as much acidity we will still have more gluten left because the bacteria isn't as active and this is a very important learning depending on which flower you have at hand you should choose which sort of starter you are making because you have more bacterial activity here inside of your liquid stutter you will need to have a flower that has more gluten to begin with okay i just quickly need to change the settings of lightning again on the camera weather here in germany is the worst sorry for that where did i stop so i was telling everybody make a liquid sutter because the taste is amazing you have a lot of dairy notes i really love this style of bread but i was also using a very strong bread flour that's a flower that contains a lot of gluten because you have a lot of gluten you can ferment for very long the flour doesn't break down so you can achieve a quite big size increase of your flour without your dough becoming a sticky mess now if you live in a place where you don't have this strong flour which is also typically way more expensive then i would advocate trying to use the stiff stutter if you're a chaser of an open chrome then the stiff stutter is great because your dough becomes more fluffy this type of stutter this div stutter is also much more forgiving because your glute network doesn't break down as much as in comparison to the other stutters that's why in my newer videos i'm always using the stiff stutter i want to enable everyone around the world to bake amazing bread with the liquid stutter i have to resort to using very expensive flowers but this is likely something that you might not have in your place in fact i made an amazing bread with the stiff starter and the cheapest cake flower that i could find i think it's a game changer now one important note to know is that even with the stiff stutter and with the regular stutter you can also make a very sour bread at the regular stutter this might be this level of size increase now with a stiff stutter you might have to go to this level of size increase to achieve the same level of acidity as with the liquid soda here the longer you ferment no matter which starter you're using the more acidity you are going to pile up so with every of these stutters you can achieve the same level of acidity you just have to ferment for a longer period of time you will ultimately get there however there is a limit to fermentation times and that's your flour after mixing flour and water certain reactions start to happen inside of your dough the seeds pretty much want to sprout and that's why they are converting the starch and the gluten into something that they can use to sprout and that's why you can't infinitely ferment your dough because the gluten is going to break down of course if you want to have less gluten that might be an option but you can't just ferment your dough for two days at room temperature it's going to start to break down at some point even if you just mix flour and water so yeah just summing it up one more time you can achieve the same level of acidity with every stutter by just fermenting it for a longer period of time but there is an upper limit to fermentation times i hope this was a helpful video and i hope this clears up a few questions you might have had on different salto stutters and the acidity levels my personal favorite stutter which you can also purchase by the way is now a regular seller that i converted into a liquid stutter to mostly focus on dairy notes and then into a stiff studder interestingly the moment you convert your solder into a liquid stutter and then back to a regular style the properties of your liquid solder are going to persist you will no longer have the vinegary notes you will just have the dairy notes and now i took that stutter and made a stiff stutter out of it which uses all the mild acidity of the liquid starter just in a better yeast bacteria balance and a stiff study thank you so much for watching and as always may the gluten be with you [Music] also thank you to all the monthly supporters this really means a lot you are making this channel possible so thank you may the gluten be strong with the supporters and of course everybody else

Channel: The Bread Code

Views: 93,536

Keywords: sourdough starter, sourdough starter tasty, sourdough starter recipe, sourdough starter acidity, sourdough fermentation, sourdough bread fermentation, sourdough starters, sourdough starter troubleshooting, sourdough starter feeding, sourdough starter bread, sourdough starter recipes, sourdough starter discard recipes

Id: nPSsWa4nGgU

Length: 8min 12sec (492 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 06 2022