I’m new to making sourdough, and I’m relatively new to baking bread in general, so please forgive me if this is a very basic question.
I’ve made a starter using nothing but dark rye flour. I’m prepping my first rye loaf right now following this pure rye loaf recipe, but I still have a lot of the rye starter left over that I’m storing in the fridge. Can I use this starter to make other kinds of bread, like whole wheat or white? If so, what kind of adaptations (if any) should I make when preparing these different loaves?
Yes, you can!
Simply use some to start an off shoot (which will become the levain for your bake). Most starters adapt well to all kinds of flour, but do tend to do better on whole grain, so something like whole wheat is a good place to start.
Thank you for the advice!
Sure using your rye starter for white or whole wheat shouldn’t be a problem. In theory, the microbe mix in a given starter might be optimized for what it’s been fed on, but in practice I don’t think it usually makes a huge difference.
In effect though, you’ll be making your wheat loaf with a certain percentage of rye flour. Personally, I wouldn’t consider this a bad thing because I think a small percentage of rye improves the flavor of wheat loaves.
However you can also adapt your rye starter into a wheat starter, by doing a refresh build from it using wheat flour. You can do a few rounds of such refreshes if you think it needs it to reach full vigor on wheat. This of course requires more time and planning ahead.
Thank you for the advice: I’ll try adapting it to a wheat starter. I’ve got lots of the rye starter to play with so I might try a few variations: create a levain with the rye starter (like the other commenter suggested) and adapt another portion.
