I keep seeing sourdough starters all over socials. How can sourdough starters be many years old. Don’t you need to use the starter to make the bread? ELI5!
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You can definitely google this very easily. But for the sake of an answer, however brief: you only use a tiny amount of the starter per loaf. Then you replenish the starter with more flour and water.
One of the important components of sourdough bread is the yeast which gives it a distinctive flavor and helps the bread to rise. The starter is basically a sample of the yeast used for the bread. You can take a small piece of the starter and move it to a new jar filled with food for the yeast to live on, and now that new jar will have the same blend and type of yeast. You can repeat this process as many times as you like, keeping the same sample of yeast alive for potentially many years just by giving it new food and a clean jar every so often.
A sourdough starter is simply a live culture of bacteria and yeast.
Imagine the culture of the sourdough starter as if it were a family.
After 100 years, the original family members (grandma and grandpa) may no longer be alive, but the “family” is still alive because their grandchildren are still around.
As long as you keep that “family” happy (feeding the starter with flour and water), they’ll keep having more and more children, and the “family” will stay alive, even if the original individuals die.
At any time, you can use some that culture ie: “the family” to create bread. When the bread is baked some of the “family” dies, but ultimately some of the family will persist in the starter.
Think of the starter like a cow, you occasionally milk a cow to get milk out, but it doesn’t kill the cow.
The starter is the same way, you take a small portion of the starter to put in your bread, but the yeast colony is still alive and growing.
A sourdough starter is a live culture of specifically chosen yeasts and bacteria on a growth medium. You use some of the starter to make the bread, and then give it more food to let it grow. Think of a fire that you can use to light a bunch of torches.
The starter is a living thing. It is made of a combination of yeasts and bacteria. When you feed these with flour and water they will multiply and grow. The way you typically make sourdough bread is that you use some of the starter in the dough but replace the yeast and bacteria you used with flour and water. The starter will then grow back to its original size. You can do this essentially forever.
Old starters is kind of a novelty though and might not mean that much. There are a lot of bacteria and yeast in the flour you feed it with which comes from the fields where the grains were growing. So the original yeast and bacteria from 100 years ago could easily have died out and been replaced without anyone noticing.
Sourdough starter more accurately is kind of like keeping a culture of bacteria as a pet. You feed that pet and maintain its environment and then in turn you use a small portion of it to make your bread while the rest of it continues to breed and continue living on.
Technically none of the bacteria in there is the same bacteria from 100 years ago but this specific culture has been fed and maintained for that entire time If that makes sense.
What about that are you not understanding?
you use a small piece of starter to make the dough for your bread, not the whole thing. you feed a starter daily by adding more flour and/or water as needed. this can go on for many years, as long as the starter is properly fed, and doesn’t get contaminated. it’s a colony of yeast microbes and the colony is effectively immortal as long as it stays healthy. individual yeast cells die, but there’s constant new cells being produced, so the colony continues.
Theseus Paradox, yo! Is it 100 years old or has it been replaced bit by bit over time? Mind blown…
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