Floragen anyone?

Cliff
My pharmacist says it's got an enormous amount of the same lactobacilli that is in Yogurt. I'm thinking that I might try it to boost the sour/fragrant aspect of the starter. I've read about people using yogurt but never tried that. Any one tried this?
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farinam's picture
farinam 2012 June 3

Hi Cliff,

I would just have to wonder why.  I'm no microbiologist but I suspect that over time the balance of bugs in your culture will revert/stabilise to where they want to depending on  what they are fed, temperature, time etc. rather than whether you add extra of one type or another.

However, despite that, why don't you just give it a try.  Just start a secondary culture with the addition and see where it ends up and report back to us .  We are all prepared to be suitably amazed.

Good luck with your projects.

Farinam

Cliff 2012 June 3

"However, despite that, why don't you just give it a try. Just start a secondary culture with the addition and see where it ends up "

That's what I'm thinking. What's the worst that can happen?

Bad or ruined batch of bread?

I've had worse things happen.

Cliff 2012 June 5

Partial results after a couple days of culturing.

 

there is a decided fragrance factor delta between my regular culture and the floragen culture. 

Fed it some floragen from acapcule   just a pinch rerally. Then diluted and re fed and added another pinch.

Total volume: half a quart of culture tops.

 So I'm adding it to a sponge I've been building  since saturday  for some sandwich bread.

 Bake day tomorrow.

It'll either kill me or taste good or bad  or not  not at all.

 

I hope it doesn't kill me. Coz I read  somewhere that death is really bad for you. Wrecks your plans and stuff.

chazzone 2012 June 15

 I make yogurt, as well as sour dough, and I have a starter that I incorporated some yogurt starter into.  I feed it exclusively with milk and flour, and it is a great starter.  I use it in all my milk bread recipes, but it works well in any recipe.

shane.d.ulrich 2012 July 6

 Hey,

 

I actually started my starter using yogurt (and beer also).  I have tried a few different starter recipes, and honestly, I believe that using the yogurt and beer to begin the starter seemed to kick-start faster than a simple water and flour recipe.  My starter began with 30g each of white, wheat, and rye flours; 60g water, 30g beer (something light like an IPA, though I'm interested in using a rye beer someday soon) and 30g plain yogurt.  It ended up being technically more than 100% hydration if you count the yogurt, but with the use of rye and wheat flours, it was still stiffer than when I used white flour and water at 100% hydration.  I have since weaned the starter off of the beer and yogurt, but I like to add it in every few weeks to a month or so for a special treat.  My breads turn out with a medium sourness to them, that becomes more sour as the bread ages.  I'm curious to try feeding my starter with a higher proportion of yogurt to flour to see if it yeilds a more sour bread.

 

Enjoy your bread!

Shane

Cliff 2012 August 5

Beer is acidic. So sourdough yeasts and bacteria should like it.   It's got carbonic acid from the carbonatin and alpha acids from the hops, plus it is am packed with  carbohydrates in the form of maltose  and  other sugars.

 

One thing about beer though: it is almost impossobe top brew a bad batch. I've seen experiments using foul slime scummed  pond water that still managed to produce a drinkable beer.   There's only about 200 organisims that can set up shop in fermenting  beer and only a tiny few of them can create off flavors and fewer still can be harmful. between the aggressive yeasts and acids   Beer is a very hostile environment for most everything.

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