Beware of the water!

One of the things I do for a living is ferment sourdough starter. I keep about five kilos of dough starter going pretty much all the time. People order it through my other website, SchoolOfSourdough.com.au. Some weeks I’m struggling to keep up, and others there are very few orders, so how much I keep at any given time can fluctuate a lot.

In order to bake every week, I need to keep the starter optimally ripe. I keep a very close eye on the starter, and over the years I have become better at reading it - what its parameters are, if you like. I’ve learned that with the use of a dough starter and pre fermentation (a ‘sponge’), dough starter can go for a few weeks between feeds comfortably. It needs about 3 days to ripen before use, and at a pinch you can ripen it up using temperature. When you compare the amount of maintenance a dough starter requires to liquid starter, a thick dough starter is heaps easier to live with.

I supply starter at all my workshops as well. People give me feed back with regard to the starter , sometimes over many years. I find this to be of incredible value, as I have learned about people’s most common issues in keeping their new pets alive.

John is a long time customer, and we chat every few weeks about our relative breadmaking practices. He lives in the Maryborough region of Queensland, and is on tank water. We’ve been trying to resolve some issues John has been having with his starter. John keeps ordering more, as he seems to have trouble getting his starter to inoculate anything. We’ve tried different techniques, different flours, different temperatures - you name it, we’ve tried it.

Active sponge

He rang me the other day to share some interesting information. John is what you might call a bit of a tinkerer. He plays around with various things, including brewing. He decided to test the pH of his water.

The pH of the water from John’s rainwater tank measured 9.2. That’s highly alkaline - water is considered neutral, and should be around a ph of 7. If it went down to 6.5, you would say it’s acidic, and generally 8.5 would be considered pretty alkaline. 9.2 is outside what would be considered safe to drink.

So John’s water is a major issue - not just from a baker’s perspective, but from a public health perspective! This indicates possible use of heavy metals in his area, and all sorts of things which indicate that something is amiss, especially as John is surrounded by eucalypt forest. Those people who think that geo engineering is a conspiracy theory, might be time to invest in your own pH meter. These things don’t happen by themselves! Of course, there are a multitude of reasons as to why the water was so strongly alkaline, but whatever the true cause was, human settlement was without a doubt involved.

In John’s case, adding a couple of drops of vinegar to his sponge was all it took to bring on inoculation. After weeks of racking both our brains to try to get some solutions to his starter issue, it came down to the water. And both of us could be forgiven for not thinking of this. John lives in an area on the outskirts of Maryborough. It’s a bushy environment. He’s using tank water.

Post script: John has been taking the pH of his water each bake now, and has since informed me that the pH has stabilised on about 7.5 to 8, so it’s still slightly alkaline, but not as bad as it was. Thank goodness!

The Bush Bakery Mk1.

I’ve experienced issues with water before - both too acid and too alkali. At Ellalong, the original Bush Bakery - the setup was cradled in eucalypts, deep in the bush. The water there was slightly acid, and I had to control fermentation by adding extra salt to my dough. On the Tour Down South a few years back I experienced the alkali water in Western Australia for the first time and it threw me, and my starter. I didn’t work out what was wrong till the trip was almost over. I had to buy spring water to make dough and feed my starter!

So the moral to the story is, as with so many things in baking, never take anything for granted. As bakers, we have to keep a close eye on everything - the flour, the temperature the time, and definitely the water.

I’m off to get myself a pH kit!

If you want some more info on keeping starters, here’s a link to my handy mini guide on the subject. It goes into some detail with regard to the use and care of sourdough starter. And for the price of a coffee you’ll be helping me to keep this information source free and uncorporatised. .