How to make, maintain, and bake with a desem starter

100% hydration starters are the most popular (and probably the easiest to get started with), but if you live in a cool climate, or if you have trouble with your starter overfermenting (or forgetting about it), or if you are working with lower-than-ideal protein levels in your wheat, it can be helpful to know about desem starters, and why sometimes it might make sense to convert your starter into a desem starter.

A desem starter is a 100% whole wheat starter which originates from the Flanders region of Belgium, and is perfect for baking bread with fresh milled wheat flour. It is very stiff, similar to pasta dough.

The benefits of desem starter

Desem was traditionally stored without refrigeration. Kept inside a bag of flour, in cool-ish temperatures, the flour would form a protective crust and insulate the starter from temperature changes, and the desem would stay in good condition for two weeks without refrigeration.

This attribute makes it perfect for people living without refrigeration, and people who are prone to forgetting about starters. With desem, the window of “I need to bake with this (or feed it) right now” is much longer than for a 100% hydration starter.

Desem also will stay at perfect ripeness for two to three days, so if you’ve fed your starter, and when it’s ready you aren’t ready to bake (or if you forget about it), you can leave it another day or two at cool temperatures and it will be fine.

The low hydration nature of desem tends to encourage yeasts rather than bacteria, so it could be something to try if you’ve been getting excessive sourness in your breads.

​Hendrik from The Bread Code experimented with what he calls a “stiff starter”, which looks similar to desem, and he found that bread made from wheat with lower amounts of protein rose far better with this low hydration starter than with 100% hydration, so desem could be something to try if your local wheat is low in protein.

How to make a desem starter

To make desem starter, start with between 10g and 50g of 100% hydration starter, add 50g water, and then knead in 100g whole wheat flour, or as much as is needed to make it similar to pasta dough. Roll it into a ball, then keep in a bag or bucket of flour, ideally at between 10ºC and 16ºC (50ºF to 62ºF). For best results, feed it every two to three days.

How to use desem starter

Desem can be used to replace 100% hydration starter in any bread recipe, just keep in mind that it will reduce the hydration percentage of the recipe, so if your whole wheat recipe is already lower than around 80% hydration, then you may want to add a dash more water to make up for it.

If you need to adjust a recipe to use desem starter, keep in mind that for every 100g desem you are using, roughly 33g of this is water and 66g of this is flour, so if you were replacing 100g of 100% hydration starter with desem, you might increase the amount of water in the recipe by 17g, and reduce the amount of flour in the recipe by 16g.

Enjoy your bread! Floury regards,
​
Kate

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