This wasn’t on my list of things to write about, but then yesterday I made a mistake, and thought I’d share my thoughts on what to do when this happens, and why it isn’t the end of the world.
There is a tendency online for people to parrot stuff without having actual experience of it, and all of a sudden the top 9 pages of search results are all saying the exact same thing, and it’s hard to find out why people are saying this. The “don’t ever ever get salt in your starter ever or the sky will come crashing down” is one of those things that gets thrown around, so what is a baker to do if she’s accidentally used all the starter in the dough, and all that is left of her beloved starter is some scrapings of salted dough left on the bowl?
This has happened to me more times than I can remember. Fortunately, I’m not especially neat and tidy, and a bit of leftover dough on the bowl has always been enough to bring the bacteria and yeasts back into the starter. Usually, it needs to be used at a higher rate than regular starter in your next feed or pre-ferment.
If you are neat, tidy, and well-organised, and unlikely to have a messy dough bowl on hand, here are a couple of things you can do to make your breadmaking more resilient:
The first is to dehydrate some of your starter and set it aside in an airtight jar, just in case. It will keep for years like this. I shared the method for this here.
The second is to work it into your baking routine that you always check that you have some starter saved before you wash the bread bowl or starter jar out.
The effects of salt on sourdough fermentation
Salt slows down the fermentation, it doesn’t kill it completely. If you end up having to use salted dough as seed starter, you may find that the bread you make the next day is not as quick to ferment or as tasty as usual, but the more you feed your starter, the more diluted that tiny amount of salt will become, and after a couple of feeds there will be no difference.
The role of salt in bread fermentation is important, and I’ll share more about this another time.
Was my bread a complete disaster today?
My solution to yesterday’s mistake involved a bit of an experiment. In my kitchen I’d left a starter jar with crusted-on starter soaking from the day beforehand, and it had a small amount of pure starter left at the bottom. I also had a tiny amount of dry scrapings from the dough bowl. Not being sure if I’d used hot water to soak the jar or not, or if these dough scrapings were enough to culture the amount of pre-ferment that I needed, I added flour and water to both things to see what would happen.
The pre-ferment I made from the dough scrapings did not seem especially active, but the starter jar was nice, active, and sour smelling. I added most of the starter jar to the bowl of dough, to give it a bit of extra goodness, and kept what was left for the dough I’m mixing tonight.
Most of the time when this kind of disaster has struck, I haven’t had any starter, just salted dough, and it has turned out fine. It helps if you can give your starter an additional feed before you bake with it next.
A step by step process to fix “forgot the starter” disasters
1. Don’t panic.
2. See if you have any pure starter scrapings in a jar - this will be more reliable than salted dough.
3. For best results, use a reasonable proportion of seed starter/seed dough in your starter feed - 1:5:5 starter:water:flour is perfect.
4. If you won’t be baking for a couple of days, don’t store your starter right away, just keep discarding and feeding it for a couple of days, and it will get back to normal.
May your starter be bubbly and your loaves rise high. Floury regards,
Kate
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