4 ms·

Using different flours for sourdough fosters different bacteria–and flavors

63 points by wglb 3y ago

esafak 3y ago
> One surprise was that rye flour fostered a much wider diversity of bacteria than any other type of flour... That is not so surprising. It is common knowledge that starters love rye, right? Now we have a scientific experiment to back it.
- 0xDEADFED5 3y ago
  shrooms love rye, too!
  - scns 3y ago
    The highest decorated Vodka is made from rye. Vodka judges love rye too!
sergioisidoro 3y ago
>"For example, the bacterial community in amaranth sourdough produces an aroma that smells almost exactly like ham," I've made a sourdough starter last summer that smelled EXACTLY like pear. It led to discover that there's all these sorts of Esthers that are named after their smell. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethyl_decadienoate https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethyl_decadienoate My chemistry and biology is highschool level, and sourdough baking (+ kombucha brewing) has been a super interesting way of exploring and being curious about those fields.
- AnthonBerg 3y ago
  Exactly that smell is the smell of high-end motorcycle engine oil. Motul 300V smells amazing. “Double ester” is one of the selling points.
jillesvangurp 3y ago
Using the right flour is something to use to your advantage if you are doing sourdoughs. One obvious thing from this article - not all flours actually contain gluten - has an implication for how you evaluate your starters. If you are looking for your starter to double in size, which is something world + dog insists on in online recipes, you need a flour that contains gluten. Flours like rye or whole wheat don't have a lot of gluten relative to white flour. And there are a whole lot of online recipes recommending specifically those flours for feeding your starter. When you bake with such flours, you get a denser bread and when you create a starter with them, you'll struggle to get them to double in size for the same reason. They'll ferment and bake just fine. But there's just a whole lot less gluten to hold the starter together. Of course there's a wide variety of flours and milling techniques that determine how much gluten is actually in each flour. It's entirely possible to have whole wheat with lots of gluten. Rye has less of it but still some. It all depends. I tend to use rye and whole wheat for flavoring. I baked a 75% spelt, 20% whole wheat and 5% rye flour bread last week. Very tasty. And I got a good over rise out of it (using a Dutch oven, which I highly recommend). My starter is the bastard offspring of whatever I had around to feed it for the past seven years. I started it off on regular white flour from the super market. What you'd call all purpose flour in the US, I guess. And since then I feed it with whatever I have around. When I don't use it, it lives in my fridge. For months on end. It ends up looking really sad. But then you feed it and it bounces right back. After observing that it was struggling to double in size with whole wheat or rye flour a few years ago, I now feed it with spelt flour. Which seems to work well. It's a German 1050 variety. Which means it's high in protein and gluten.
- fransje26 3y ago
  What's the obsession with having your starter double in size? I haven't heard about it before. I'm feeding my starter by weight, so that I can take the same amount out when I bake, and the volume of growth really doesn't come into play.. I mix in whatever I have, mostly rye and spelt, sometimes wholegrain wheat, but it hardly ever doubles in volume and the bread comes out fine at the end of the process. If you have a nice range of bubbles sizes forming in your newly mixed starter, you'll be fine.
  - 3y ago
gniv 3y ago
Neither this study nor the previous one from the same authors seems to look at the water. I would have thought the hardness of the water also influences what grows in the starter. Especially with white flour, which has few minerals.
- badcppdev 3y ago
  Have you done any experiments on this? Using hard water vs demineralised? I have no idea if this is a thing that's spoken about in the Sourdough baking world.
  - roofone 3y ago
    I find that my sourdough starter’s smell is noticeably more yogurty (lactic acid) and less tangy (acetic) when I add a tiny amount of food grade calcium to the water. There’s a similar effect on the final bread as well, but there are other factors (eg fermentation time/temperature) that probably have a bigger effect on the final loaf. I believe the calcium feeds the lactic acid producing bacteria, favoring their growth.
- Tor3 3y ago
  I'd never thought about the water.. my wife started making sourdough bread a year ago, and now she's making them all the time.. extremely tasty. Her starter always seems to grow to nearly triple size. She uses mostly rye for that, I think, but she varies stuff. The water around here has basically zero hardness. There's never any need to remove calcium from anything, ever. Never seen any calcium deposits, unlike when I lived in Italy.
glodalitazic 3y ago
As a celiac i am not surprised ;)
- hooo 3y ago
  Celiac of like 25 years here. I started making gluten free sourdoughs a couple months ago. I base my technique on the bakerita.com recipe, but now use all sorts of flours. It is amazing
  - oladon 3y ago
    I'd love to get your bread recipe! I tried my first GF sourdough recently (from a very basic 4-ingredient recipe), and it was... not fantastic. Didn't rise much at all, even after giving it a lot of time to do so. Planning to try King Arthur's recipe next...
beauzero 3y ago
If you live in Georgia, Bread Beckers is an excellent source of different grains and instruction. Most of her classes/workshops are free on YouTube as well. Changing our diet with good grains has really helped overcome some chronic health conditions.
- cinntaile 3y ago
  What do you mean with good grains?
  - beauzero 3y ago
    Organic or bulk/modern farmed, having a variety like white, red, soft, hard wheat varieties, kamut, oats, rye, different types of rice, beans, etc. For us grinding them directly then baking so that they have not been bleached and had nutrients added back (basically for shelf life). The "bread becker thing", without getting into religion, boils down to a philosophy that commercial flour (without even thinking about adding additional gluten) has many micro nutrients removed during the process of stabilizing for shelf life that it loses a significant portion of its nutritional value. By storing whole grains (shelf stable) and grinding it right before cooking/preparation preserves the most nutrients possible. They have hard to find (in the US) mixers, grain grinders, etc. Most regions in Georgia will have a co-op that will take monthly orders and bring them back from Woodstock so that you don't have to drive there. We live about 2 hours away and found out about it through friends and our local farmers market. They have a full kitchen there where they do cooking demonstrations and record for youtube.
yegle 3y ago
Someone once told me that bread making is like managing a bacteria zoo. You use sugar and flour to feed them and use salt to control their growth.
- Tor3 3y ago
  Well.. common style bread making uses yeast, and no bacteria are involved, for the most part. And yeast also likes sugar and flour. The salt doesn't make any difference at all in my experience, as far as growth is concerned, it's purely to get the exact right taste you want. To actually impact growth I believe it would make the bread too salty to eat. Sourdough bread making is different in that you're feeding a kind of symbiotic relationship of lactic acid bacteria and natural (non-industrial yeast), and you try to get the balance of your sourdough starter right (too much bacteria - it gets sour. You don't actually want sourdough bread to be sour, except for maybe a slight hint of it. Too little - you don't get a nice bread). And there's also a risk that other unwanted bacteria start growing and destroys the taste you're looking for. So yes, for sourdough you'll have to take care of your sourdough starter. It's not that it's terribly tricky. And you can e.g. flatten it and dry it completely and keep it that way, and re-start it later. Nice if you're flying to elsewhere, for example (something I did). But even here I don't know anyone who adds salt to the starter, you add salt when you make bread, and that's purely for taste (in my household salt was forgotten several times.. everything works out exactly the same, you don't notice until you try tasting the bread..!)
TYPE_FASTER 3y ago
A great read about the importance of flour: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/13/baking-bread-in-lyon https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/13/baking-bread-i...
- dendrite9 3y ago
  Another good read/listen is this gastropod episode (https://gastropod.com/secrets-of-sourdough/ https://gastropod.com/secrets-of-sourdough/) which features cool projects like a global sourdough sequencing project (http://robdunnlab.com/projects/sourdough/ http://robdunnlab.com/projects/sourdough/), a sourdough library (https://www.puratos.com/campaigns/the-lab---18th-of-october https://www.puratos.com/campaigns/the-lab---18th-of-october), and it's caretaker (https://www.instagram.com/sourdough_librarian/)/ https://www.instagram.com/sourdough_librarian/)/ They did an experiment with bakers from around the world making starters with the same flour, bringing them together and looking at what was in them. From the transcript: DUNN: When we looked at the bakers’ hands, their skin bacteria on their hands was about half sourdough bacteria. And so they, like, have sourdough paws. DUNN: We’ve looked at zillions of hands. We’ve never seen anything like this. And so the first result is that the bakers themselves have changed in response to their occupation. TWILLEY: Normal hands like mine and Cynthia’s and Rob’s—they are something like 2 to 4 percent Lactobacillus. DUNN: On the hands of the bakers, it is like it’s the star of the show. It’s wild. I mean, if it’s right, you should be able to put flour and water on a baker’s hand and it should start to ferment immediately and become acidic. GRABER: Working with sourdough has entirely changed the microbial environment on the bakers’ skin. They’ve been colonized by their pets! Rob wonders if the bakers spend so much time with their hands in acidic dough that the sourdough Lactobacillus microbes end up with a competitive advantage over normal skin microbes.

63 points by wglb 3y ago

> One surprise was that rye flour fostered a much wider diversity of bacteria than any other type of flour... That is not so surprising. It is common knowledge that starters love rye, right? Now we have a scientific experiment to back it.

0xDEADFED5 3y ago
shrooms love rye, too!
- scns 3y ago
  The highest decorated Vodka is made from rye. Vodka judges love rye too!

sergioisidoro 3y ago

>"For example, the bacterial community in amaranth sourdough produces an aroma that smells almost exactly like ham," I've made a sourdough starter last summer that smelled EXACTLY like pear. It led to discover that there's all these sorts of Esthers that are named after their smell. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethyl_decadienoate https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethyl_decadienoate My chemistry and biology is highschool level, and sourdough baking (+ kombucha brewing) has been a super interesting way of exploring and being curious about those fields.

AnthonBerg 3y ago
Exactly that smell is the smell of high-end motorcycle engine oil. Motul 300V smells amazing. “Double ester” is one of the selling points.

jillesvangurp 3y ago

Using the right flour is something to use to your advantage if you are doing sourdoughs. One obvious thing from this article - not all flours actually contain gluten - has an implication for how you evaluate your starters. If you are looking for your starter to double in size, which is something world + dog insists on in online recipes, you need a flour that contains gluten. Flours like rye or whole wheat don't have a lot of gluten relative to white flour. And there are a whole lot of online recipes recommending specifically those flours for feeding your starter. When you bake with such flours, you get a denser bread and when you create a starter with them, you'll struggle to get them to double in size for the same reason. They'll ferment and bake just fine. But there's just a whole lot less gluten to hold the starter together. Of course there's a wide variety of flours and milling techniques that determine how much gluten is actually in each flour. It's entirely possible to have whole wheat with lots of gluten. Rye has less of it but still some. It all depends. I tend to use rye and whole wheat for flavoring. I baked a 75% spelt, 20% whole wheat and 5% rye flour bread last week. Very tasty. And I got a good over rise out of it (using a Dutch oven, which I highly recommend). My starter is the bastard offspring of whatever I had around to feed it for the past seven years. I started it off on regular white flour from the super market. What you'd call all purpose flour in the US, I guess. And since then I feed it with whatever I have around. When I don't use it, it lives in my fridge. For months on end. It ends up looking really sad. But then you feed it and it bounces right back. After observing that it was struggling to double in size with whole wheat or rye flour a few years ago, I now feed it with spelt flour. Which seems to work well. It's a German 1050 variety. Which means it's high in protein and gluten.

fransje26 3y ago
What's the obsession with having your starter double in size? I haven't heard about it before. I'm feeding my starter by weight, so that I can take the same amount out when I bake, and the volume of growth really doesn't come into play.. I mix in whatever I have, mostly rye and spelt, sometimes wholegrain wheat, but it hardly ever doubles in volume and the bread comes out fine at the end of the process. If you have a nice range of bubbles sizes forming in your newly mixed starter, you'll be fine.
- 3y ago

gniv 3y ago

Neither this study nor the previous one from the same authors seems to look at the water. I would have thought the hardness of the water also influences what grows in the starter. Especially with white flour, which has few minerals.

badcppdev 3y ago
Have you done any experiments on this? Using hard water vs demineralised? I have no idea if this is a thing that's spoken about in the Sourdough baking world.
- roofone 3y ago
  I find that my sourdough starter’s smell is noticeably more yogurty (lactic acid) and less tangy (acetic) when I add a tiny amount of food grade calcium to the water. There’s a similar effect on the final bread as well, but there are other factors (eg fermentation time/temperature) that probably have a bigger effect on the final loaf. I believe the calcium feeds the lactic acid producing bacteria, favoring their growth.
Tor3 3y ago
I'd never thought about the water.. my wife started making sourdough bread a year ago, and now she's making them all the time.. extremely tasty. Her starter always seems to grow to nearly triple size. She uses mostly rye for that, I think, but she varies stuff. The water around here has basically zero hardness. There's never any need to remove calcium from anything, ever. Never seen any calcium deposits, unlike when I lived in Italy.

glodalitazic 3y ago

As a celiac i am not surprised ;)

hooo 3y ago
Celiac of like 25 years here. I started making gluten free sourdoughs a couple months ago. I base my technique on the bakerita.com recipe, but now use all sorts of flours. It is amazing
- oladon 3y ago
  I'd love to get your bread recipe! I tried my first GF sourdough recently (from a very basic 4-ingredient recipe), and it was... not fantastic. Didn't rise much at all, even after giving it a lot of time to do so. Planning to try King Arthur's recipe next...

beauzero 3y ago

If you live in Georgia, Bread Beckers is an excellent source of different grains and instruction. Most of her classes/workshops are free on YouTube as well. Changing our diet with good grains has really helped overcome some chronic health conditions.

cinntaile 3y ago
What do you mean with good grains?
- beauzero 3y ago
  Organic or bulk/modern farmed, having a variety like white, red, soft, hard wheat varieties, kamut, oats, rye, different types of rice, beans, etc. For us grinding them directly then baking so that they have not been bleached and had nutrients added back (basically for shelf life). The "bread becker thing", without getting into religion, boils down to a philosophy that commercial flour (without even thinking about adding additional gluten) has many micro nutrients removed during the process of stabilizing for shelf life that it loses a significant portion of its nutritional value. By storing whole grains (shelf stable) and grinding it right before cooking/preparation preserves the most nutrients possible. They have hard to find (in the US) mixers, grain grinders, etc. Most regions in Georgia will have a co-op that will take monthly orders and bring them back from Woodstock so that you don't have to drive there. We live about 2 hours away and found out about it through friends and our local farmers market. They have a full kitchen there where they do cooking demonstrations and record for youtube.

yegle 3y ago

Someone once told me that bread making is like managing a bacteria zoo. You use sugar and flour to feed them and use salt to control their growth.

Tor3 3y ago
Well.. common style bread making uses yeast, and no bacteria are involved, for the most part. And yeast also likes sugar and flour. The salt doesn't make any difference at all in my experience, as far as growth is concerned, it's purely to get the exact right taste you want. To actually impact growth I believe it would make the bread too salty to eat. Sourdough bread making is different in that you're feeding a kind of symbiotic relationship of lactic acid bacteria and natural (non-industrial yeast), and you try to get the balance of your sourdough starter right (too much bacteria - it gets sour. You don't actually want sourdough bread to be sour, except for maybe a slight hint of it. Too little - you don't get a nice bread). And there's also a risk that other unwanted bacteria start growing and destroys the taste you're looking for. So yes, for sourdough you'll have to take care of your sourdough starter. It's not that it's terribly tricky. And you can e.g. flatten it and dry it completely and keep it that way, and re-start it later. Nice if you're flying to elsewhere, for example (something I did). But even here I don't know anyone who adds salt to the starter, you add salt when you make bread, and that's purely for taste (in my household salt was forgotten several times.. everything works out exactly the same, you don't notice until you try tasting the bread..!)

TYPE_FASTER 3y ago

A great read about the importance of flour: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/13/baking-bread-in-lyon https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/13/baking-bread-i...

dendrite9 3y ago
Another good read/listen is this gastropod episode (https://gastropod.com/secrets-of-sourdough/ https://gastropod.com/secrets-of-sourdough/) which features cool projects like a global sourdough sequencing project (http://robdunnlab.com/projects/sourdough/ http://robdunnlab.com/projects/sourdough/), a sourdough library (https://www.puratos.com/campaigns/the-lab---18th-of-october https://www.puratos.com/campaigns/the-lab---18th-of-october), and it's caretaker (https://www.instagram.com/sourdough_librarian/)/ https://www.instagram.com/sourdough_librarian/)/ They did an experiment with bakers from around the world making starters with the same flour, bringing them together and looking at what was in them. From the transcript: DUNN: When we looked at the bakers’ hands, their skin bacteria on their hands was about half sourdough bacteria. And so they, like, have sourdough paws. DUNN: We’ve looked at zillions of hands. We’ve never seen anything like this. And so the first result is that the bakers themselves have changed in response to their occupation. TWILLEY: Normal hands like mine and Cynthia’s and Rob’s—they are something like 2 to 4 percent Lactobacillus. DUNN: On the hands of the bakers, it is like it’s the star of the show. It’s wild. I mean, if it’s right, you should be able to put flour and water on a baker’s hand and it should start to ferment immediately and become acidic. GRABER: Working with sourdough has entirely changed the microbial environment on the bakers’ skin. They’ve been colonized by their pets! Rob wonders if the bakers spend so much time with their hands in acidic dough that the sourdough Lactobacillus microbes end up with a competitive advantage over normal skin microbes.