"Don Hellen" > wrote in message
...
> Is there any reason I couldn't use the "Friends of Carl"
> starter and put it into my liquid starter base that worked
> for me for 10+ years?

This begs the question of why, if your starter has worked well for 10 years
why muck with it?

> I'm thinking of sending out for two of their packets (with a
> donation for the trouble, of course!) and using one in my
> liquid base of water, sugar, and potato buds, the very same
> that I've used successively for 10+ years.
>
> As a backup, I figured I could always make the starter up
> the way the directions have it spelled out and use a
> different type of starter base if the other fails to work
> with this culture.
>
> Any suggestions/comments?
> Don Hellen

Obviously one could order any number of packets for any number of reasons
but logic would suggest one starter would more than suffice.....feed it
appropriately and you can fill your house with gallons of starter for all
sorts of experiments in short order.

Combining starters probably makes little rational sense since a viable
culture is generally understood to be dominant organisms from a weeding out
process of many.....combine the two "winners"and you simply start a new
war(competition for resources) and one or the other will dominate.... on the
other hand a cup or two of flour is pretty cheap so experiments are not
exactly cost prohibitive. Soggy

Rod & BJ wrote:

> Combining starters probably makes little rational sense

It can make sense when one starter is based on heterofermentative and
the other on homofermentative LB's. You would then make bread from two
starters to effect mainly taste.

Or, you would grow one starter with emphasis on yeast and the other to
emphasis LB's and then combine them to make bread, mainly to affect
rise.

The amount of complexity introduced by a very simple factor (doubling
number of starters) is tremendous.

Samartha


--
remove -nospam from my email address, if there is one
SD page is the http://samartha.net/SD/

Don Hellen wrote:
>
> On Mon, 20 Oct 2003 20:26:25 -0700, "Rod & BJ"
> > wrote:
>
> >> Is there any reason I couldn't use the "Friends of Carl"
> >> starter and put it into my liquid starter base that worked
> >> for me for 10+ years?
> >
> >This begs the question of why, if your starter has worked well for 10 years
> >why muck with it?
>
> I must have not been very clear here. My starter appears to
> be non-viable now. I am trying to revive it, but it doesn't
> look very promising after a week.
>
> Sorry for the confusion.
>
> Donald Hellen

Mixing two different starters will probably result in the dominant starter
killing the other. Stablished sourdough starters have anti-biotic properties.
Which will survive is probably guesswork.

Do a google search or go directly to
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/food/sourdo...ection-21.html where some of this
is lightly touched although the context is not quite the same.

You really should lay back and read the faq. Try reading
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/food/sourdough/faq/ It has a lot of interesting
information.

The search for "sourdough antibiotic" (no quotes) yields over 1300 hits. Most
are way over my head but some provide useful information. No, I haven't read
all, just a dozen or so.

wrote:

>
> Mixing two different starters will probably result in the dominant starter
> killing the other. Stablished sourdough starters have anti-biotic properties.
> Which will survive is probably guesswork.

Probably true when you continue growing them.

One observation in this context:

(I think, that's also on my web site somewhere)

When I refresh my starters every two month, I get something like 1 - 2
quarts of overflow starter since I take something out and add again and
I keep rye and white starters separated.

At one point, I had this mixture of rye starters and it smelled
tempting. So I made bread with it and the taste was just extraordinary
great.

That's one of my future projects to get more into this.


Samartha

--
remove -nospam from my email address, if there is one
SD page is the http://samartha.net/SD/

Hi folks,

In this regard, Probably my current favorite sourdough starter was mad
by mixing the Austrian from SDI and Carl's. I have no way of determing
which organism of each type won, but the flavour is different from
either parent, and quite delightful.

Ian


In article >,
Samartha Deva > wrote:


>
> At one point, I had this mixture of rye starters and it smelled
> tempting. So I made bread with it and the taste was just extraordinary
> great.
>
> That's one of my future projects to get more into this.
>
>
> Samartha

in article , Don Hellen at
wrote on 25/10/03 9:01 pm:

> On Mon, 20 Oct 2003 20:26:25 -0700, "Rod & BJ"
> > wrote:
>
>>
>>> I'm thinking of sending out for two of their packets (with a
>>> donation for the trouble, of course!) and using one in my
>>> liquid base of water, sugar, and potato buds, the very same
>>> that I've used successively for 10+ years.
>>>
>>> As a backup, I figured I could always make the starter up
>>> the way the directions have it spelled out and use a
>>> different type of starter base if the other fails to work
>>> with this culture.
>>>
>>> Any suggestions/comments?
>>> Don Hellen
>>
>> Obviously one could order any number of packets for any number of reasons
>> but logic would suggest one starter would more than suffice.....feed it
>> appropriately and you can fill your house with gallons of starter for all
>> sorts of experiments in short order.
>>
>
>> Combining starters probably makes little rational sense since a viable
>> culture is generally understood to be dominant organisms from a weeding out
>> process of many.....combine the two "winners"and you simply start a new
>> war(competition for resources) and one or the other will dominate.... on the
>> other hand a cup or two of flour is pretty cheap so experiments are not
>> exactly cost prohibitive. Soggy
>
> Again, I must not have been very clear in my post, or
> assumed that my previous posts would have been sufficient to
> provide some background on my situation. Looking back at the
> post, I'm sorry that I didn't explain it better.
>
> Anyway, I have no plans to combine starters. What I was
> referring to was to try a sourdough starter (or two, but
> separately) in a liquid base similar to what I've used for
> over 10 years. If that didn't work, I'd do the flour-based
> starter. Mine used potato buds, sugar, and water, and seemed
> to keep the lactobacillus bacteria and yeast very happy. I
> just didn't bake any sourdough for so long (and didn't feed
> the culture, either) that it seems to have died.
>
> Sorry for the confusion, but thanks for the help.
>
> Don Hellen
It might be good to try just flour and water if that is the kind of bread
that y ou are making. That way you will know that the starter will produce
a rise in the bread you are working on. Ellen