Hi, I've maintained and used a sourdough starter many years of my life, and I've tried different methods of making the stater. For a while, I would make my bread and then pinch a piece of it off (a "levain") and let that function as my sourdough starter for the next loaf.
More recently, I feed a cup of sourdough starter with flour and water each day, and after a few days when it gets old enough, I start a new one using a small amount of the sourdough as a "seed" and discard the rest (usually I make bread with it).
My question is about the seed - if a sourdough starter has a variety of microbes, the way I seed the next starter might have an impact, it's a form of selection.
Since they are microbes, I assume there are many of them in the sourdough and I don't need much to get "enough" of a sample to keep a healthy culture going - I just stir a spoon in the old sourdough, then use that same spoon (with the little bit of sourdough stuck to the spoon) to stir the new sourdough's flour and water together, and that's it.
But I keep thinking about how this might be a kind of selection - and I was wondering if there is a significant difference in, for example, a levain method of pinching off a piece of the whole and the microbial sampling that has vs the sampling from just not cleaning off the spoon when stirring the old and then the new.
I would imagine the levain has a greater likelihood of all the microbes being present, while a single spoonful might constitute a more narrow subset of microbes? Or maybe the microbes are distributed evenly enough in the sourdough that a spoonful represents as broad a sample as a pinched off piece?
I haven't noticed any obvious, practical differences in how the starter is made, but I'm wondering if a theoretical, significant difference exists.
I guess some of this paranoia comes from thinking about Zeno's paradox, the 100 prisoner problem, and the Monty Hall problem.
A levain seems more likely to contain a small amount of each kind of microbe (since the whole is incorporated and then mixed well before being divided into a part) than the approach of starting a new starter from a single spoonful (which necessarily selects only a subset first from the whole - a subset which may or may not be as evenly distributed as from a levain).
In practice this probably makes no difference, but maybe there could be minor ways a spoon would preference some kinds of microbes over others (maybe if the spoon were made of silver, for example, the microbes that survive contact with the silver would be more likely to carry on to future generations?).
Anyway, thoughts? (Other than about my mental fitness, lol.)
Theoretical difference possibly. Significant difference definitely not. The equilibrium that is eventually reached in the environment they thrive in (your sourdough) is not likely to be any different as a result of slightly different starting populations. Even if you were completely missing certain kinds of microbes, which seems hilariously unlikely, like winning the lottery every week for your entire life unlikely, these microbes are ubiquitously present in the air and the environment anyway and will quickly colonize your dough if there is a viable environment for them.
The more important question is whether it matters to you. Do you find it tastes any different, or are you just having existential "fear of missing out" about the bread that could have been?
yeah, just having a Charlie Kaufman moment (yes, an existential fear of making my sourdough in the wrong way, lol).
Thanks for the salve, kind stranger ๐
It's all good, it's an interesting thing to think about! But my personal opinion is that the biggest issue you're likely to see due to not having enough or the right proportions of culture in your starter is that you would just end up with a starter that underperforms in growth for a short time until the missing population can catch up. And it's unlikely to make a meaningful difference in the grand scheme of things, which is why people generally don't make much of a big deal about it, and there are so many different theories that people swear by (and of course they do, because they all work)
No matter what you do, you're never starting from zero of any population, because like I said they're in the environment, they're in the wheat itself, they're everywhere. Technically you can start your own "wild" sourdough culture just by leaving a wheat and water mixture to ferment for long enough, although the timing will vary (again, because you're never starting from zero, but you might be starting close to zero for awhile, until the population can establish itself and build itself up, which takes various amounts of time depending on what the exact starting conditions are) but we're not talking years, we're talking weeks at most. Bacteria reproduce fast.