Instant Sourdough Culture

These little beasts do all the hard work. Share how to keep 'em happy and working hard.

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contrahead
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Instant Sourdough Culture

Post by contrahead »

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One of my holiday presents hanging from the tree this year was a package of sourdough starter culture. It is a new product, packaged for Red Star, but from some place in Milwaukee. The ingredients of its hefty 18 gram bulk included 3 types of flour, vitamin C, sorbitan monostearate (an emulsifier / surfactant), yeast, lactobaccillus and some undisclosed “enzymes”. About 2/3 rds of the contents were a reddish looking powder.

I baked a batch (3 loaves) with it already and put a pint jar of wet starter culture away in the fridge, to use again. The bread was very good but not very unusual. There was nothing sour or reminiscent of lactobuccillus - as far as I could tell. I have seen some energetic homemade starters that were very active. The sourdough pancakes made from one batch had to be held down by spatula to keep them from jumping out of the skillet. Big bubbles were popping in the mix before it was dolloped into the hot skillet and the pancakes had evidence of big gas bubbles after they were cooked.

I've got some dried out starter culture abandoned in the fridge; begun from potatoes several years ago. I could wake it up again and use it. That culture was much like this culture: sweet, safe but undistinguished in twangy character.

https://redstaryeast.com/red-star-plati ... ugh-yeast/

I checked out the redstaryeast.com site but found it to be a bit fluffy and without hardcore information. Under “Science of Yeast” and “Manufacturing of Yeast” though they claim to use a 40,000 gallon fermenting tank to “cultivate” the yeast in before it's harvested. That's like the volume of two normal swimming pools.
Omnia mea mecum porto
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