Choosing The Right Flour For Your Starter
The Right Flour Matters
Besides bleached and bromated flours there is no wrong choice here. All purpose is a great all around place to start. A rye starter will give whatever bread you to put it in a great rise and a great tangy kick. Whole Wheat will give your bread an incredible rise because its packed with all the nutrients, bacteria, and natural yeast of a whole grain, as well as imparting your final bread with a nutty flavor. An ancient grain such as spelt will make your starter powerful and impart an earthy flavor to your bread, packed with all the purported benefits that “ancient grains” have. You don’t even need to use flours or grains that create gluten. Gluten free sourdough starters are great and can be very powerful cultivators of natural yeast. Buckwheat will make a great starter and will impart incredible flavor to your breads.
However the one thing you have to remember is consistency. Your starter will not like mixing and matching different flours. Once you feed it with one flour that’s what that starter will be and you will have to feed it that accordingly. So yes spelt might be an obvious choice because its powerful and tasty, but it could be an expensive prospect. Stronger flavors like Rye and Buckwheat might be great but what if you want a bread that is more subdued?
I recommend whole wheat flour and or white flour to start with. Their flavors are typically neutral and as an all round choice they are your best bet. But again as long as the flours are unbleached and unbromated you really can’t go wrong. Don’t think of the starter as dough. You have to think of the starter as your leavening agent. The starter is what’s going to give your bread the rise and lift that it needs to be airy. Why is sourdough starter better than yeast? Because it tastes better. There is a tangy acidic flavor that cannot be duplicated and once you personally acquire a taste for sourdough other bread will pale in comparison. But the bottom line is that starter is your yeast. That is why it doesn’t really matter what you use to to cultivate the wild yeast in the air. The mixture that you create to cultivate the yeast doesn’t need to have gluten. It doesn’t need to be sterile, in fact sterile is almost the exact opposite of what you want.