Nine weeks before the rye starter was worth baking with

Every account I read said a rye starter would be ready in a week. Mine took nine, and the difference between week one and week nine was not the bubbles but what the bread did afterwards.

Baked: 18 April 2024
Written up: 25 August 2024
Reading: 7 minutes
Kitchen: Frankfurt am Main

Stage 01Weigh out

Week one looks like success and is not

The first jar bubbled hard on the third day and smelled of pineapple and wet hay, and I believed every bit of it. A fortnight later I mixed a loaf with that jar and got a dense brick with a grey crumb and a flavour somewhere between vinegar and glue. What bubbles on day three is mostly a bloom of bacteria that will be gone again by day six, and the yeasts that eventually raise bread arrive later and much more quietly. The jar went silent in week two and I came close to pouring it away.

Believing the early bubbles cost me four bakes and most of a kilo of flour. The signal I watch instead is punctuality: the same rise, at the same hour after feeding, at the same temperature, three days running. Height matters far less than repeatability. My jar first managed that in the middle of the sixth week, and by then it did not smell exciting at all, just faintly of yoghurt and damp grain, which is what a working rye starter smells like on an ordinary day.

Stage 02Work it

Flour, water and the question of the tap

I began with whole rye bought in a paper sack on a Saturday morning at a market two tram stops away, ground within the previous fortnight, and I have never managed to start a jar as quickly with supermarket flour since. Fresh whole rye carries the organisms on its bran, while flour that has sat in a warehouse for half a year carries far fewer of them. The water in this building is hard and chlorinated enough to smell on a warm day, and standing it overnight in an open jug made a visible difference to how fast the jar got moving.

Ratios mattered less than I expected them to. For the first fortnight I fed one part starter to one part flour to one part water by weight, because that is easy to do half asleep, and moved to one to two to two once the jar was lively enough to need it. Rye drinks more than wheat, and the paste should be thick enough to hold a spoon mark for a second before it closes over. Any thinner and the jar separates into grey liquid and sludge within a few hours.

Stage 03Watch it

The windowsill, the radiator and the temperature problem

The kitchen faces north and sits at about eighteen degrees for most of the year, which is comfortable for people and slow for fermentation. A rye starter at eighteen degrees takes eight or nine hours to peak; the same jar at twenty-four takes four. For the first weeks I chased warmth badly, carrying the jar onto the radiator shelf every evening and forgetting it there until morning, which took it to nearly thirty and produced a starter that smelled of acetone and did almost nothing once it reached dough.

What worked in the end was choosing one place and leaving the jar entirely alone. The shelf above the fridge holds twenty-one or twenty-two degrees all year and varies by perhaps a degree between January and July, and it is high enough that I do not knock it over reaching for something else. Consistency turned out to matter more than the number. Once the jar stopped being carried about, its peak settled at roughly five and a half hours, and I could plan a bake around it instead of guessing at breakfast.

Stage 04Write it up

What nine weeks actually bought

The bread changed before the starter looked any different at all. A loaf mixed in week four rose to maybe two thirds of the height it should have, took an hour longer than the note allowed for, and tasted flat in a way I could not name at the time. The same recipe in week nine gave a proper dome, a moist even crumb and a sourness that sat behind the grain rather than in front of it. Nothing visible about the jar had altered. The population living inside it had.

One jar survives now, about two hundred grams of it, fed twice a week and baked from once. It has been through three summers and three winters without ever being dried, frozen or split into a backup, which is either confidence or laziness depending on which week you ask. Twice it has been left unfed in the fridge for nine days while I was away, and on both occasions it came back within three feedings, smelling considerably worse than the bread eventually tasted.