The First Steps

I had trouble finding different flours at a grocery store, but luckily there was a bulk barn that just opened up recently near my house so I paid it a visit and found everything that I was looking for.

I found the flour I wanted to use:

From left to right, Whole Wheat Bread Flour, 12 Grain Flour, Unbleached White Bread Flour, and Stone Milled Dark Rye Flour

The Jars I'll be using for 'feeding':

I labelled the jars to remember which flour is in which. It's a good idea to weigh the empty jars too so that you know how much to remove/add during feedings because after you zero your scale for your initial starter, it'll be a lot of extra steps having to remove it all to zero the scale again just to weigh what you are adding to it. These 1L jars were 440g.

If you were following my previous post then you might be wondering why there's only six jars instead of the 8 I decided on before. Well...this is taking up a lot of space in the kitchen to do such an experiment over the next few weeks so I wanted to minimize the real estate I'd be taking up on the counter. So I cut out the cake flour starter and the AP flour starter as the cake one already had less protein content to begin with so I was just setting that one up for failure and the AP flour is 'too available' so I went with flours that were more 'exotic/unique'. Although after I do run this test I'm not opposed to trying both of the ones that didn't make the cut at a later date and try more combinations.

Here I am weighing the jars I'm using sorry I didn't realize it was so blurry:

Zeroing/Taring the scale and adding the flour

I went out to get distilled water as well, you could use tap water and let it sit out overnight or maybe boiling it will help too, but the chlorine found normally in tap water can reduce the amount of growth your starter could potentially have.

Make sure to warm this water up to 85-90℉ for ideal growth and 'sourness'

From here I tared the scale again and added 150g of lukewarm water:

Try to be precise as possible here. I went a little over, but I tilted it and took a teaspoon to take out that gram of water out. Yes, 150g of water is the same as 150mL, but this is considerably more easy to read and measure than relying on your eyes in a measuring cup that won't always have 10 or 25mL increments indicated

After adding water to each jar I used a rubber spatula to mix them together. Now to keep it consistent I actually numbered the jars as you can see in the previous picture and the upcoming picture. I did this so that way I knew (and wouldn't forget) which order I mixed the starters in. Now I didn't cross contaminate, but for the sake of a little bit of time as I'll have to check up on them daily it was safe to first mix the bread flour and then the bread/rye mix with the same spatula, wash it, then mix the WW and then the WW/rye mix, wash it, and then mix the rye and finally the 12 grain. Essentially not cross contaminating as the 'pure' starters had clean spatulas and the mixed starters I used spatulas with the same ingredient already present. And this is what they looked like after all of that mixing (it wasn't that much):

So as you can see there are clearly different colours in the flour, but what struck me the most was that some were thicker than others and that probably had to do with how much water the flour itself could take in. Particularly the Bread and 12 Grain flours were the most runny and the Rye was thickest followed by the Whole Wheat. 

Now with those observations found in the picture's caption in mind, I would probably do a bit more research and see if the other flours required less water to get a starter going (more than likely yes), but I hope that doesn't put a big enough wrench in this operation.

From this point on it'll be a matter of feeding these starters daily, my research shows that discarding about half of the starter and then adding a fresh amount of flour and warm water. The point in discarding some of the starter is to maintain acidity levels and also so it doesn't overgrow your vessel and a lot of expansion can occur. Note that I didn't use the ring part of the mason jars and only put on the lid tops so that excess gas can be expelled or else they can literally explode if sealed. That's it for this week, I'll be sure to take more pictures in the coming days for my weekly GHB update!