Sometimes it just doesn’t work. You have bought high-quality flour and secured a warm place in the kitchen. You may even have used bottled water because you are not sure how much chlorine there are in the tap water. But can you see any activity in your starter?
No.
At best, you may see some small, pitiful bubbles on the surface.
But you want more. You want lots of bubbles. You want a starter that’s trying to break out of the glass jar you keep it in.
A starter that’s overflowing is a beautiful sight for a sourdough nerd.
It doesn’t matter how messy it is. You just feel pure happiness when it occurs. Why? Because you know you can’t fail with such a starter.
But most of the times the activity is a little bit more restrained. And that’s ok. You don’t need a starter that looks as if it’s going on steroids to get a good result. All experienced bakers know that. But you need some activity. You can not bake something with a starter that looks dead or appears to be in some sort of semi-coma that had made Maleficent in Sleeping beauty jealous.
It happens to everyone. Even experienced bakers suffer from this problem now and then. A sourdough starter is something very complex, sensitive to all sort of things that we sometimes can’t control.
It is on such occasions that it is tempting to try to take a shortcut. To add something that will kickstart your starter. You have probably heard about it. People add fruits, juices, yogurt, and all sort of stuff to their sourdough starter to get some activity. This kind of experiments often meets criticism from at least some sourdough aficionados. They claim that you can’t jump-start a sourdough starter. It has to take its time. Besides, you’re adding bacterial cultures that don’t belong in a sourdough.
Personally, I have never tried anything, except raisin yeast. But that is a well-known concept in the sourdough world. Some bakers claim that a real levain must be started with raisin yeast.
But what about pineapple juice? Or yogurt? Does it work? I honestly don’t know. But that’s what we’ll find out.
I’m planning to write a couple of posts about different methods to increase the activity in your starter. I will make a simple test where I compare two batches of starters. I will present my result, and then I hope we all can have a discussion about it.
OK, let’s start. And the first one out is Yoghurt.
When you read in different forums, you will find many who think yogurt works well in their starters. Others, however, are skeptical. I have to admit that I belong to the latter. Let me explain.
There are bacteria from the lactobacillus family in both the yogurt culture and the sourdough starter. So far so well. However, most of the bacterias in yogurt are homofermentative. That means that they only produce one product from the sugar they consume. And most of them produce lactic acid.
Now, you want lactic acid in your starter, but you also want a small amount of acetic acid, carbon dioxide, and alcohol. And bacteria that produce these substances are quite rare in yogurt. That’s my theory. But I’m not an expert when it comes to microorganisms. That’s why I have to test it.
For this test, I used my wheat starter that I have had for many years. I chose the wheat starter because they are normally the most troublesome. I feed it with flour and water and divided some of it into two half-cup batches. But in one of them, I also added a tablespoon of yogurt. I then left them for 8 hours.
And the winner is
Nobody. It ended in a draw. As you can see on the picture below the levels are almost identical. The batch with the red rubber band that contains yogurt has no higher rise than the one with just flour and water. As you may see, the starter has quite high hydration. I made it like that on purpose because I wanted a quick result. Higher hydration means quicker fermentation time. A bit too quick perhaps. If you look at the left batch, you can see that the level has already started to sink back. Maybe I should have reduced the hydration a bit to get better pictures, but I don’t think it had affected the result. I should also mention that I repeated the test three times with the same result.
That confirms my theory that there is no point in adding yogurt to the starter, right? Or does it?
Have I overlooked something? Or is the test incorrectly performed? Do you agree or do you think I’m totally out of track? Please make a comment. I would love to hear your opinions about this.
