I see people on food network shows talk about how they use a hundred year old sourdough starter for their bread. I don’t understand how it’s reused over and over – is it a matter of how the other ingredients are added? (sorry if i used the wrong tag, wasn’t sure where this fit)
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Starter is like dough without salt and it is colonized with wild yeast. The yeast give it that flavor and every place has their own indigenous wild yeast. If you find a flavor you like, you have to make sure that particular strain doesn’t die off.
The simplest way of doing this, and this is what most people who make it at home do, is make sure you don’t use all the starter. You mix the starter in with the flour and water that you are planning on using for a loaf of bread, but don’t use all of it. Keep a small portion in reserve.
Add more flour and water to the starter, mix it up, and cover it to keep new wild yeast out. That’s it. The starter and the dough you just made will become a new home for an ever expanding colony of the yeast you just introduced.
You can also mix up all the starter with the flour and wait for it to be colonized and then put some of the new dough back. That’s more common in bakeries where they are making huge batches of bread and need as much starter as they can get to kick off the process.
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