- At the initial phase when the culture is busy developing, adding grapes, potato water, grated onions, and honey, can serve as a extra nutritional value which the culture can feed on.
- When starting a culture, its wise not to use a high-protein flour, high-protein flours contains less starch, and culture feeds on starch which got all the nutrition in.
- Always try to use purified water, chlorinated water impedes fermentation and can be harm full for a fragile culture at the beginning.
- Its recommended that you do NOT use bleached flours when starting a culture, lot of the nutrition is lost in the bleaching process, try to use stoneground flour which still contain most of the nutrition for the culture to feed on.
- Rye flour is mostly use at the beginning stages of a culture, rye flour is high in nutrition and fermentable sugars, and can help the culture with a good start.
- There are about 200 times more microorganisms in whole grain flour compare to white flour.
- So, some bakers soak bran in water over night, and use the water in the culture, the water will contain all the nutrition the culture need.
- The bacteria in sourdough culture mainly comes from a genus Lactobacillus. In a young culture and developing cultures, homofermentative bacteria develops, producing lactic acid. In older cultures more complex flavors is present which produce both lactic and acetic acid.
- Lactic acid provides the smoothness, taste like yoghurt, while the acetic acid gives the sour tang.
- Lactic acid like warmer conditions and loose dough conditions, whereas a acetic acid likes the colder conditions, and more stiff doughs. So by manipulating temperatures and hydration levels
the baker can change the outcome of the flavour of the culture.
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