this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2025
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Sourdough baking

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Sourdough baking

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Question about using rye starter (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
submitted 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) by gid@lemmy.blahaj.zone to c/sourdough@lemmy.world
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I'm new to making sourdough, and I'm relatively new to baking bread in general, so please forgive me if this is a very basic question.

I've made a starter using nothing but dark rye flour. I'm prepping my first rye loaf right now following this pure rye loaf recipe, but I still have a lot of the rye starter left over that I'm storing in the fridge. Can I use this starter to make other kinds of bread, like whole wheat or white? If so, what kind of adaptations (if any) should I make when preparing these different loaves?

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[โ€“] blackbrook@mander.xyz 2 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) (1 children)

Sure using your rye starter for white or whole wheat shouldn't be a problem. In theory, the microbe mix in a given starter might be optimized for what it's been fed on, but in practice I don't think it usually makes a huge difference.

In effect though, you'll be making your wheat loaf with a certain percentage of rye flour. Personally, I wouldn't consider this a bad thing because I think a small percentage of rye improves the flavor of wheat loaves.

However you can also adapt your rye starter into a wheat starter, by doing a refresh build from it using wheat flour. You can do a few rounds of such refreshes if you think it needs it to reach full vigor on wheat. This of course requires more time and planning ahead.

[โ€“] gid@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 19 hours ago

Thank you for the advice: I'll try adapting it to a wheat starter. I've got lots of the rye starter to play with so I might try a few variations: create a levain with the rye starter (like the other commenter suggested) and adapt another portion.