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!
In: Other
I’m a professional baker kind of specialized in naturally leavened products like sourdough. A lot of people have explained how they work and they’re right. What I want to say is that an old starter really isn’t that old. As far as I’m concerned it’s really only as old as its last feeding and it usually only takes around three weeks to get a starter going from scratch.
The culture itself doesn’t come from the air as so many people think. The wild yeast and lactobacillus are present in the flour already, and adding water allows them to wake up and start fermenting. This is important to remember when cultivating a starter as leaving it open to air flow isn’t really necessary. It’s also important to realize that when you’re feeding the starter you’re incorporating new yeast and bacteria that might impact the balance of the culture.
Furthermore, the feeding schedule, temperature, feeding ratio, and bill of grains will impact the balance of the culture. Feeding it while keeping it dormant in the fridge will have a different profile than keeping it at room temperature all day. Each have their advantages and drawbacks. Depending on the desired final product you may choose any combination of variables to suit your needs.
Ultimately what I’m saying is a 100 year old starter just means that someone remembered to feed it for 100 years. And I’m not dismissing that accomplishment, that’s actually pretty cool, and it’s nice to have a family heirloom like that, it just isn’t really much different from a starter I can make in a few weeks.
You normally have a “mother” that you keep a small part of to make a new one essentially keeping it alive for that long.
I mean, it kinda can be but it’s really not. It’s just for the artsy baker people to have bragging rights and win pissing contests. I have a starter that’s 14 years old. I have another one that’s a month old. I couldn’t tell you the difference in the final product. It’s just for people who need to find another way to be elitist and obnoxious.
Sourdough starter contains yeast and bacteria. These grow and multiply as long as you ‘feed’ the starter with flour and water.
So a 100 year old sourdough starter has been given more water and flour for 100 years. This keeps making it bigger, so some can be used for baking bread and you still have plenty leftover.
None of my starters have made it past a week. I feed them and follow instructions, but they always either mold up or don’t rise and fall
It’s like saying a forest is 1000 years old. Doesn’t mean the trees in that forest are 1000 years old, yeah? Yeast normally lives about a week, but as long as they’re popping out baby yeast…
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.
Latest Answers