"Roy" > wrote in message=20
ups.com...

> Peaking of the starters is not given much importance in the bakery ...

And anyway, as I understand it, the bakers are always standing
ready with their bakers' yeast.

For the home (amateur) baker, I have proposed attention to the=20
concept of exponential growth, where conditions are maintained so
that the number of microorganisms increases logarithmically with=20
respect to time represented linearly on the abscissa of a Cartesian
representation. Please see the diagram at=20
http://home.att.net/~carlsfriends/di...owthcurve2.GIF
which is constructed by iterating a segment of the curve shown at
bottom left, which is a portion of the well-known "growth" curve,=20
as described at
http://samartha.net/SD/SourdoughDefinition.html#SEC10

By me, and by the more sophisticated amateur bakers as well, the=20
name of the game is to maintain exponential growth until just before=20
bake time.

The rationale I have proposed for that is shown in the ideograph at
bottom of my diagram: (a) the bacterial products accumulate or=20
(b) bacteria increase their numbers greatly because of the availability=20
of food consisting of the corpi of senescent starving yeast, and start=20
to really churn out their acidic, tasty products. Or both (a) and (b).

A common mistake is to attempt to increase flavor/tartness by taking
the sponge (represented as the 3rd refreshment) over the bend, that is,=20
past the transition phase. A kind of sourdough can be made that way,
but going past exponential growth stalls the process, and necessitates
repeating the lag and acceleration phases, or, for the professional
baker, necessitates adding bakers' yeast, or, most commonly, getting=20
used to the notion that sourdough loaves are sour bricks.

It may be of interest to note that the curve shown at
http://samartha.net/SD/SourdoughDefinition.html#SEC10 also
describes pretty well the growth of the human race on this planet.

--=20
Dick Adams
<firstname> dot <lastname> at bigfoot dot com
___________________
Sourdough FAQ guide at=20
http://www.nyx.net/~dgreenw/sourdoughfaqs.html