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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So there’s some good answers as to what 100-year old sourdough starter definitions are.
I would point out that this is an obvious counterfactual definition if you are talking about the yeast itself. The yeast is only as old as the oldest living cell which will typically be about 1 week.
It is exceptionally unlikely that a 100-year old yeast lineage even contains a direct DNA lineage that is related to the original starter yeast.
This is hard to do in advanced labs for even fractions of this length of time due to contamination risk of live culture or maintenance issues with -80 cold storage.
So the “starter” can be 100 years old, but the yeast can’t be more than a week (roughly), and may not even be related to the yeast from last month let alone last century.
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