"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


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