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Carl Griffith's 1847 Oregon Trail Sourdough Starter
- voisin 3y agoI understand that the microbes in a starter change quite quickly to the microbes in the surrounding environment. I.e. that buying a starter from a distant place doesn’t mean you are getting the terroir of that location. I cannot at the moment find where I read this but I think I’ve come across it several times and that it is sort of common knowledge.
- taylorfinley 3y agoFrom the FAQ: "Could local environmental organisms change the starter? Possibly. Some microbiologists did a study on how stable established strong and healthy starters are and they found that essentially, a strong starter out-competes other organisms in the environment and keeps its characteristics. This is what we have found with our starter. It continues with its characteristics since we have been providing it."
- darkerside 3y agoWouldn't it then outcompetes those microbes outside of the starter itself, and change the local terroir over time?
- irrational 3y agoOf course the ones wanting you to pay them money would say that.
- mrb 3y agoAh yes, the corruption power of all the money they must be making with that extra $0.05 when they ask to mail $2.00 for an international stamp that costs $1.95...
- 0ct4via 3y agoLet's take (over) 65,000 starts distributed since 2000 on the Carl's friends site[1] - and call it 65k for rounding. That's 65k starters, with your negative unhelpful comment assuming $0.05 / 5¢ "profit" per starter. That's 325,000¢ - or $3250 USD "made" in nearly a quarter of a century. That "profit" discounts 24 years of: - PO Box rental - web hosting - domain fees - labels and bags for starters to go out in - envelopes, if the one provided isn't suitable or sufficient - electricity for refrigeration and freezing of starters - ingredients for feeding and maintaining the starters $3250 over 24 years gives a mean of $135 per year -- obviously this will fluctuate from year to year, and costs have risen since the early 00's -- likewise there have probably been more requests as the internet has grown more popular, and the word of Carl's friend spread further. If you think ~$135 (or even ~$100 on a slow year) is sufficient for everything above -- never mind the time and work donated by the growers and keeper of the mail box -- then you're very much mistaken. Furthermore, if you think they're being "paid" for their work out of that, your misanthropic and "negative nancy" response, is sorely mistaken. Of course, all of this presumes that every item is international shipping, and paid for in the "substituted" two $1 bills, or IRC. 1. For US domestic shipping, they just ask for a 63¢ self-addressed and stamped envelope [2] 2. For your profit-implying "they want you to pay them" comment, see: "Requests sent outside the US require $1.55 US postage *or* substitute two U.S. one-dollar bills or an IRC (International Reply Coupon)" [2] Note the "or" part -- it's a choice, not a mandate. Firstly, you can send them what it costs, $1.55, as you like - via PayPal, cash in an envelope, whatever. Their "two $1 bills" option is handy for places like Canada which may have US note currency -- and the IRC is useful in places that don't have US currency in regular circulation. Secondly, many places don't actually sell international reply coupons any more. While the UPU mandates their acceptance and swapping for postage, they don't mandate the sale of IRCs [3]. For example, Royal Mail (in the UK) hasn't sold them since December 2011 -- therefore requiring the use of PayPal, finding $2 in bills somehow, or sending the $1.95 in change. If you think Carl's friends have somehow become massively rich over the past quarter-century by checks notes mailing out carefully-maintained 1847 sourdough starter, likely at a loss... please let us know how you've worked that one out. [1] http://carlsfriends.net http://carlsfriends.net [2] http://carlsfriends.net/source.html http://carlsfriends.net/source.html [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_reply_coupon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_reply_coupon
- NaOH 3y agoThe typical changeover in a sourdough culture moving locations is about one month, assuming regular feeding. As a professional bread baker I am disappointed that this fact is often withheld/obscured by people selling portions of their starters. If there weren't significant location-based differences then, for example, the distinctive San Francisco sourdough flavor could be replicated by sourdough bakers anywhere. Likewise, Puratos—a company generally known for its manufacture and sales of baking mixes—wouldn't maintain a sourdough library, akin to the Svalbard seed vault. The best reason to acquire an existing sourdough culture would be to start with a healthy, vibrant culture. I think the gain is minimal, both in time and labor. And the person who will typically have a lasting interest in sourdough bread baking is someone who is drawn to the whole process and not after that type of shortcut, especially during the initial learning stages.
- echelon 3y agoAnother way to look at this is that your existing cultures can be invaded, colonized, and replaced over time. The thing you think is constant and unchanging might be metamorphosing just as much as your hometown in the face of real estate development. Nobody keeps these in labs or -40 C and below freezers, so they'll absolutely face invasive evolutionary pressures.
- geokon 3y agoI heard that "the distinctive San Francisco sourdough flavor" was due to the water. The Hetchhetchy water in SF has a very distinctive taste. One of the only cities I go to regularly where the tap water tastes amazing
- taveras 3y agohttp://carlsfriends.net/SourdoughFAQ/32-San-Francisco-Sourdough.html http://carlsfriends.net/SourdoughFAQ/32-San-Francisco-Sourdo...
- sndean 3y agoYou can buy some of that Lactobacillus species from ATCC: https://www.atcc.org/products/27651 https://www.atcc.org/products/27651 They also sell bacterial pathogens and other things useful for researchers, so that's pretty interesting (at least to me). I never really think about the overlap of food and microbes. It's also called Fructilactobacillus sanfranciscensis in some places. I can't quickly tell which is the more recent naming and what lead to that change. It's lactic acid bacteria regardless.
- bongodongobob 3y agoI think the idea would be that you only use small portions of the starter, not the whole thing. I'm familiar with keeping yeast cultures for brewing and this seems to be the technique if you are keeping live cultures. Get your sample, split it up, and keep track of the generations.
- deaddodo 3y agoThe only way you can keep a "pure" influence would be to use the entire sample donated to you by the company (and even then, there will be local influence). Bread doesn't pick up a ton of bacteria during it's fermentation period, it's the feeding cycle where it will. If you split the culture into many small ones, you're just guaranteeing all of them will be supplanted the moment they're fed.
- bongodongobob 3y agoCan't you sterilize what you're feeding it? I don't get it.
- deaddodo 3y agoSterilize it how? There's inert yeast and bacteria on your flour at all times. That's what allows you to create a starter from scratch. What do you want to do, bleach raw flour every time you're about to drop it in your starter? I'm sure if you were in a lab environment and absolutely needed to, there are options to do so. But not for most home bakers.
- plorg 3y agoKen Forkish says basically this in Flour Salt Yeast, but I also assume it is relatively well known among the more empirically-minded bakers. In any case the flavors developed in the bread will have much more to do with both the hydration of the dough and the temperature it rises at (as I understand it these will affect the balance of acetic and lactic acid development as well as the CO2 and trace ethanol production in the starter). In Ken's book he asserts that the difference in flavor between sourdough in different places has more to do with local(ly-developed) tastes, recipes, and practices. My sense is that you would have to be a very practiced (that is, consistent) baker to notice the difference imparted by the possibility culture in your own bread.
- carlmr 3y ago>Ken Forkish says basically this in Flour Salt Yeast To anybody reading this. I can not recommend this book enough. It takes you from making so so bread to amazing bread if you read it for a day or two.
- barsonme 3y agoMy only complaint is that his sourdough starter chapter has you make buckets of the stuff. Maybe it’s supposed to make it more difficult to screw up, I dunno.
- deaddodo 3y agoHe makes everything at industrial yields and doesn't bother to adjust for home use/yields.
- dredmorbius 3y agoAnd, protip: the secret is bakers' percentages. That is, to scale a recipe up or down, hold the relationships of ingredients proportionate to that of flour, by mass. E.g., a typical starter is fed at a 100% ratio: 1 unit of flour to one unit of water. So, 100g, 1,000g, 200g, whatevs. Similarly for your dough, which is often described in terms of hydration. A very low hydration might be 50%, a typical novice dough about 60--65% (excellent for pizza crusts and rolls in my experience), 80% should start giving a very open crumb (with large voids and bubbles), and 100%+ used for high whole-grain flour, or very open-crumb breads. Higher hydration makes for more challenging handling, though with time most bakers develop a feel for this. There are of course a myriad of other factors, and one of the joys (or frustrations) of sourdough baking is exploring those parameters. My experience is that even my disasters taste amazing, though visual appearances may be less impressive. Amongst those: temperature (hugely significant for both starter and sponge/dough/proofing), proofing time (warm and cold/retarded), types of flour, age of flour, oven temperatures, humidity, and probably a whole lot more. Again, even when things don't go to plan, the results are almost always rewarding. When you do happen to hit the magic balance, it's amazing. My bad batches are still amongst the best bread I've ever eaten. Good baking books and online guides will discuss this.
- irrational 3y agoThis is true. Just make your own. If you buy one and start feeding it, soon it will be identical to the one you could have made on your own. All it requires is flour and water and time.
- dredmorbius 3y agoAnd by "time", to clarify, a week or two of regular (1x to 2x daily) feedings.
- deaddodo 3y agoUnless you're baking 3+ times a week, it doesn't make sense to keep a constant fresh culture. This is the biggest deterrent to many people getting into it, in fact. If you want to bake occasionally, you can just refeed after using a portion, letting revitalize to between 70% and peak and tossing in the fridge for 1-2 weeks. Also, as a side addendum, if you're worried about using your culture at "peak strength", then just avoid the question altogether and just make an overnight preferment of some sort (sponge, poolish) from the culture.
- bluGill 3y agoI make sourdough pancakes several times per week. This keeps my starter fresh. I don't measure, just an egg, a bit of oil (50-75ml) beat well then add starter until my bowel is around half full (500-600ml) and mix some more. Then disolve a couble scoups (10 ml) of baking soda in water (50-70ml) and mix in. Cook fast.
- dredmorbius 3y agoThese are delish, and you can absolutely play with the recipe.
- amluto 3y agoI use baking powder for this. It works about as well (although you need more of it), but it minimizes the risk of localized areas of too much baking soda, which tastes quite nasty.
- dredmorbius 3y agoWhere "local environment" is extraordinarily influenced by the flour you feed your starter with. Which itself is influenced by growing location and conditions, storage, transport, and distribution, etc. I'd be interested in seeing specific research on how much "wild yeast" and lactobacilli outside of the feeder flour actually influences starter. My strong suspicion is that this is somewhat less than is often considered, if only because of the difficulty of starting one's own sourdough from sterilised flour (bleached), which is to say, being highly dependent on wild yeast. The other factor I suspect is the evolution of one's own starter culture based on conditions (feed frequency, temperature, flour, storage conditions, light/darkness, etc.) in which it exists.
- bluGill 3y agoUnpleached flour is easially available in the stores where I live. That is how I started my starter this summer.
- dredmorbius 3y agoUnbleached flour can work. It typically takes longer. Whole meal, or other flours (rye and spelt notably) can really "juice" the process. Rye seems to strongly encourage starter activity. Mixing even only 1/4 of an alternate (whole meal, rye, spelt) in with unbleached flour makes new starter development much faster, and can also help refresh an older starter.
- ycombinete 3y agoI moved once, out into a desert area. The microbes in the new environment were so virulent and horrible that my starter was instantly destroyed. Every new starter I tried would flare up into great bubbles after one day, and would just stink to high heavens after 3. It looked like a great starter, but exuded the most revolting rotten smell. I tried bleaching all the containers. Changing flours. Storing it in a different place. Nothing. Something out there in the desert was ready each time.
- poulsbohemian 3y agoI got some of this years ago - was a pretty good starter, but I'm not sure it is really anything different from whatever starter your neighbor might have available. If you don't have a neighbor or friend with a starter, years ago there was a thread on HN about people making their own starters with good success.
- gerad 3y agoI’ve made my own starter a couple times. It’s really no big deal. Takes a couple weeks of waiting but maybe an hour of total time over that two weeks.
- taylorfinley 3y agoI've made my own! This was 15 years ago or so, in Los Angeles. It was fun as a hobby project; I started a bunch, harvesting wild yeasts from my kitchen, outdoors, etc. A couple turned out pretty yummy, a couple were pretty funky. But recently I bought some dried starter from a well-respected line and have been blown away with how much better the starter we bought is compared to the wild harvested runs I tried. If a friend asked I would tell them it's really not worth it to use a wild strain unless your hobby is microbiology... If your hobby is baking, stick with a known-good starter.
- poulsbohemian 3y ago> If a friend asked I would tell them it's really not worth it to use a wild strain unless your hobby is microbiology... If your hobby is baking, stick with a known-good starter. I really agree with this, given my own experiences, but I will say some of the best bread I ever had came from a chef who started his own at a wilderness camp. Anyone who came out to camp, he would share it, but unfortunately mine went bad after a while.
- yumraj 3y agoWhich one did you buy?
- dredmorbius 3y agoKing Arthur has a recipe for those interested: <https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/blog/2012/04/05/make-your-own-sourdough-starter https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/blog/2012/04/05/make-your-o...> There's now quite a sourdough ... culture ... substantially invigorated after the Covid-19 pandemic (xkcd:2296), with books, podcasts, websites, vloggers, etc. I picked up much of my own baking knowledge through these (starting with a few YT videos, and progressing through my own experimentation and further research). I'm still going and just had a couple of slices of my latest batch with eggs. Starters are startlingly resilient, though you can kill them off or spoil them, largely through heat or prolonged regret. As any good sysadmin knows, good backups are essential. I'd restarted my batch from a pinch of dough that was proofing in the fridge after one inglorious encounter with a microwave and housemate. After that I dried and froze a batch (King Arthur covers this as well: <>), and a tablespoon of the frozen starter plus about a half-dozen feedings has it going strong again. (This differs from KA's recovery method, but worked.) Drying another batch to freeze as we speak, can never be too sure ;-) Using someone else's starter can help bootstrap the process, but your own environment's selective pressures and new sources of yeast, most of whice come from whole-meal flour, which is what you should use to start your own batch. Note that bleached white flour, whilst it can be used to bake or feed however much I'd advise against it, typically lacks any active yeast. I did do some baking with unbleached flour when that was all that could be obtained, and the results while poorer than with unbleached / whole-meal were still quite acceptable, just not my preference.
- nanolith 3y agoI recently introduced my wife to the process of creating a sourdough starter. We created our own over two weeks. I used the yeast and bacteria in the starter to jump start a crock of peppers that I'm fermenting to make hot sauce.
- sharphall 3y agohttps://www.denverpost.com/2024/02/01/carl-griffith-oregon-trail-sourdough-starter-greeley/ https://www.denverpost.com/2024/02/01/carl-griffith-oregon-t... Apparently it has blown up on TikTok and they are overwhelmed with requests.
- zoky 3y agoI tried this once and ended up dying of dysentery…
- jb1991 3y agoLucky. I caught smallpox from mine.
- doodlebugging 3y agoAre those scars on your face from learning how to use silverware? Back in the early 80's when Walmart was a new thing in towns across the country, I found a t-shirt with that question printed on it.
- petesergeant 3y ago> History Of The Starter? In the mid 1800's the Oregon Trail was the main route west for settlers, farmers, lumbermen and prospectors. The Trail started in the state of Missouri in about the center of the continental US and meandered WNW for about 2000 miles to the Oregon Territory. Other trails branched off of the main trail, SW to Santa Fe and west to California and elsewhere. The Starter came West in 1847 with one of Carl's ancestors who traveled the Oregon Trail to Oregon by wagon train.
- kylegalbraith 3y agoIt's always a lot of fun to see stuff like this on HN. It's a reminder that there are still a lot of fun and amusing things on the internet. I also love seeing stupid simple HTML sites like this. It's hideous to look at but it serves exactly the purpose it's there to do. It's also really fast.
- codazoda 3y agoI make a little framework for “stupid simple HTML sites” and use it as a “starter” for most of my own work. https://neat.joeldare.com https://neat.joeldare.com
- m0d0nne11 3y agoBah! when I requested my sample way back in `96 we only had USENET, and we LIKED it!
- sneak 3y agoIt’s also easy to make stupid simple HTML sites that aren’t hideous to look at (CSS doesn’t make it slow) that are fit for purpose and are really, really fast. My website is one such example. Putting JS in the render path is a mistake.
- ggm 3y ago"It depends" https://www.agriculture.gov.au/biosecurity-trade/policy/legislation/list-approved-starter-cultures https://www.agriculture.gov.au/biosecurity-trade/policy/legi... (Australia)
- teruakohatu 3y ago> NOTE: Jan 2024: We have been slammed with thousands of requests (20 times the usual amount) so please be patient in the time it will take to receive your starter.
- m0d0nne11 3y agoWow! I sent off for a sample back in 1996 but IIRC I managed to kill it before baking a decent loaf - maybe I'll try again. (Being a packrat I still have the original emails...)
- m0d0nne11 3y agoAnybody here ever attempted to develop a Desem culture as described in the Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book?
- davidw 3y agoBurns, Oregon (Carl's home town) and Harney County do not appear on Hacker News very often, but what an amazing place it is. Recently, it's probably best known for the Bundy family and company taking over the wildlife refuge south of Burns. But it's well worth a visit for some of the natural attractions, the most prominent of which is Steens Mountain and the Alvord Desert just below it to the east. Much of it is incredibly remote - the county is more than 10,000 square miles ( 26,490 km2 - more than half the size of the Netherlands and twice the size of Connecticut ) and has fewer than 8000 people. https://harneycounty.com/ https://harneycounty.com/