Keeping your starter healthy and happy
Let’s be honest, sourdough starter doesn’t like being in the fridge. On a purely biological level, both yeast and bacteria thrive in far warmer environments, so in this inhospitable environment they go into preservation mode. Their metabolic processes slow to a trickle, and the symbiotic balance of the culture is disrupted. Within a day or two, the starter begins to develop acid load, and the microbial populations begins to drop because of the stress. Once taken out of the fridge again, the starter is often sluggish and generally needs several feedings at room temperature (or warmer) to get back into a healthy state. Sure, you can bake with unfed starter from the fridge, but in my experience the results can often be lackluster.
But I also understand keeping it in the fridge. Most home bakers aren’t baking bread daily, and keeping starter at room temperature means feeding once or twice daily, which also means discard and waste. So for those that only bake once a week, or perhaps even less often, I see the appeal of putting their starter into hibernation in the meantime.
But what if there was a better way? A way you could somehow keep your starter active, healthy and balanced, and also not have to feed it twice a day, every day, whether you were baking or not. Well that's exactly what the Sourdough Home from Brod & Taylor does! It has a temperature range of 41-122˚F (5-50˚C), and can easily hold a quart container or two pint containers inside.
I have been using one for almost a year now, and it's been an absolute game changer for me! When I am in baking mode I can keep my starter at a consistent temperature, whether that is cooler or warmer than the ambient room temperature. There are many times when a levain build calls for a cooler overnight rise, or a series of successive shorter and warmer rises. For lievito madre refreshes, both warmer strengthening refreshes and cooler maintenance refreshes are called for within the same day. The Sourdough Home handles all of that with ease, which means one less thing for me to worry about.
And in addition to making maintenance easy, the Sourdough Home is also a great way to begin experimenting with temperature in terms of flavor and dough characteristics too. I wrote an extensive article about why dough temperature matters, and those reasons carry over to starter temperature also. The single greatest improvement in my bread overall came when I not only started taking temperature into account, but I also began taking steps to actively control it.
Temperature is an ingredient in sourdough, and the Brod & Taylor Sourdough Home is the perfect tool for any baker looking to replicate that consistency at home.
