The Secret That Brings These Pancakes to Life
'A sourdough starter is not a metaphor, I tell myself when one dies on my watch. It’s a bit of fermented flour, a microbial jumble of bacteria and yeast, used by cooks to raise doughs and give baked things a delicious, complicated tang. It is not a plant, or a low-maintenance pet in a romantic comedy, whose health and happiness reflect its owner’s maturity.
A dead starter could be caused by a rare bloom of mold. Or a little too much time somewhere hot. It could be a persistent lethargy that slows things down once and for all. Neglect, really. But the truth is that sourdough starters are fairly sturdy, and they can live long, untragic lives too, passed down through generations, bubbling on for years. I know this is true because Angela Johnson Sherry, a massage therapist who lives in Bedford-Stuyvesant, in Brooklyn, is the keeper of one that was born in her grandparents’ kitchen 61 years ago.
Just after they were married, when they were living along the Missouri River near Fort Peck Dam, Leo and Margaret Murr bought a packet of dry sourdough starter at a grocery store, went home and mixed it up. Once a week, the newlyweds fed their starter with flour and milk, and let it ferment overnight. They reserved some of that airy mass to make the next week’s pancakes, and mixed the rest with eggs, salt, baking soda and sugar, to make some pancakes right away. It was a recipe without an end, and it made optimism part of their routine, always giving the couple another batch to look forward to. They went on making pancakes.'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/16/magazine/the-secret-that-brings-these-pancakes-to-life.html?
Cast-Iron Sourdough Pancakes
https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1018663-cast-iron-sourdough-pancakes
= new reply since forum marked as read
While it's true that a starter can perpetuate pretty much indefinitely under the right conditions, there's lots of misconceptions about how that works. Knowing how it works can help you propagate that culture.
The yeast and bacteria involved will only live for a few generations (measured in days, not years) without being replenished. In other words, if you are feeding your culture, but not giving it new yeast and bacteria, it will lose it's effectiveness and eventually die out entirely. The yeast and bacteria you want is already resident in the flour you use. That's why you don't need to use another culture to start your own culture. All you need is flour and water. Using another culture just kickstarts everything and shortens the time before a new culture is usable, but only by a few days. Another misconception is that the yeast and bacteria in the culture comes from the surrounding area. While there are similar yeast and bacteria already resident in your kitchen, they aren't the type you want to culture. The ones you want feed on flour and they are already in the flour you buy.
So people will often go to San Francisco and buy a starter from there thinking they will get the exact same results at home. The reality is they will almost certainly not. There's many different ways to feed a sourdough culture, by changing the flour used to feed it, the hydration, and the feeding schedule. If you duplicate all of those things, you will get similar results, regardless of how you start your culture.
