I saw a recipe for an Amish Friendship Bread that called for buttermilk in the starter and feedings. If I made this and gave some away, are the recipients now required to continue to feed the starter with buttermilk or can they feed it like a normal starter? I don't want to make this one if it is forever required to "eat" buttermilk.
Baking – Amish Friendship Bread starter with buttermilk
bakingbreadbuttermilkstarter
Related Solutions
Soy milk is bitter. Enzymes in the beans (lipoxygenase) combine with fats in the presence of water to produce what is usually described as a "beany flavor"; bitter and grassy.
The solution to this problem, although not done in many traditional soy milk preparations, is to cook the soy milk long enough to destroy the enzyme. Many, but not all, soy milk manufacturers will cook the milk as well as add a lot of flavorings to mask the bean flavor.
When enough lemon juice is added to soy milk it will coagulate but in my experience it does not produce flavors more bitter than the milk itself. I have, however, found that, regardless of coagulant, soy milk declines in quality very quickly and, even when I thoroughly boil it to deactivate enzymes and "beany" compounds, it will go from sweet to bitter in just a few days. I have also had homemade soy milk start to turn after a relatively short amount of time developing rancid flavors or activity that implied fermentation such as independently souring or clabbering.
I don't have any proof but based on my own experience I suspect that the lemon is not the culprit. If your milk has become so bitter as to be inedible then I think your soy milk may have spoiled.
As for the foaming- in your comment below you mentioned that the soymilk in question was Silk. Silk is one of the most modified soymilks- they definitely err on the side of flavor rather than simplicity and have a lot of additives for flavor and texture.
One of the additives is Calcium Carbonate. Calcium Carbonate gently coagulates soymilk and is sometimes used for making silken tofu. In Silk it is no doubt used to make the product more creamy.
The existence of Calcium Carbonate in your milk could explain your foaming as it can form CO2 in the presence of acids.
Notes
Soy milk does not coagulate well with lemon juice. It requires a lot of acid to coagulate and so is overly sour and it abruptly produces a very fragile curd. I agree that the advice that you read must have been for baking. If you can't use real buttermilk then in such a dish I would recommend silken tofu for the creaminess and don't worry about the acidity.
In general the way to temper bitterness is to add salt.
As a rule of thumb food that is bitter is often poisonous. I don't imply that that is the case here but you should trust your tongue better and not feel forced to eat questionable food.
Sourdough starters are rarely completely ruined, unless you're growing significant amounts of mold or something.
It is possible that your refrigerated "break" early in establishing your starter ended up hurting the yeast population and accidentally selected for something else (perhaps undesirable bacteria) that is now growing and creating odd odors.
It's also possible that your starter is perfectly healthy and well-established. A strong starter should often rise and begin to fall in 12 hours or less. Mature starters tend to go through a cycle where they smell yeasty as they are expanding, have alcohol notes around the time of collapse, and then acidic (vinegar/acetic acid and lactic acid) notes as they age further, due to bacteria converting the yeast waste products into acids.
Have you tried to bake with your starter yet? I'd see how well it works and whether it can successfully leaven bread dough. If so, it's probably fine. Starters do often go through periods of odd smells and weird behavior in the first couple weeks, but they'll stabilize after more regular feedings as a more consistent set of microorganisms becomes permanently established.
You don't mention any liquid floating on top ("hooch") or any discoloration. If those were appearing, I might be a little more concerned. If not, try baking a small loaf with it, and see what happens. My guess is that it won't be very sour, but with a feeding regime like you have, it probably shouldn't be.
Lastly, you asked about whether more frequent feeding is required. I don't think so, given how much you dilute your starter during feeding. Twice per day feedings are recommended at room temperature for those who do something like a 1:1:1 (i.e., 1 part starter:1 part flour:1 part water by weight) or 1:2:2 feeding. You're doing something closer to 1:8:8, which means it will take longer for the yeast to process all the new flour and then for the bacteria to deal with those waste products. The only danger with such high dilution in young starters is that microorganisms actually present in the flour may still be able to overwhelm the things you want to grow and/or the starter may not be developing enough acidity by the end of your growth cycle to kill off those bad things.
Does your starter smell (or taste) acidic right before you feed it? (It doesn't have to be strongly acidic, but at least mildly so.) If so, I think your starter is likely very healthy and having youthful growth spurts.
In any case, I'd test it in a batch of dough before trying to diagnose further. In a worst case scenario, as long as you're getting some acidity before feeding (and not seeing mold, hooch, discoloration, or other weird things besides the odor), you should just keep feeding regularly, and it will likely sort itself out in a week or so.
Related Topic
- Dough – Issue starting a sourdough starter
- Bread – halve the Amish Friendship Bread recipe
- Dough – How to properly substitute flour and water for sourdough starter
- Dough – Sourdough starter bubbling but not rising after months of feeding
- Bread – Not feeding sourdough starter enough
- Baking – How to use sourdough starter
- Dough – Is this okay or moldy? Sourdough starter question
Best Answer
Probably not...
Though there are plenty of starters that include dairy, instant mashed potatoes, fruits, etc to inoculate or feed the starter; the goal of any starter culture is to grow and maintain a of yeasts that can efficiently and effectively raise bread, normally wheat or rye-based bread. Any ingredient added to a starter other than water and wheat/rye, in my opinion, only increases the chances of ruining a perfectly good starter through contamination. The species of yeasts and bacteria that flourish in milk or on fruit may lead to off-flavors. In cultured buttermilk (widely available in the US) the milk is first pasteurized then inoculated with a mixture of bacteria to produce the tangy flavor and thicker texture. Unfortunately, this often includes bacteria from the genus Leuconostoc which are known to cause off-flavor in starter cultures and their resultant breads.
On the Other Hand...
Unlike sourdough starters (where a procession of bacteria acidify the mixture to the point where only wild yeast and certain bacteria will happily live there) your buttermilk starter probably has a pH around 4.5. This is the pH where commercial yeast functions optimally, lower than that (pH 4) the yeast will produce less gas, a lot lower (pH 3) they won't produce any gas at all and may die off. Refreshing the starter regularly with a mixture of buttermilk and flour provides food for the yeast and helps maintain that optimum pH.
If your friend stopped feeding the starter with the buttermilk mixture and just used a flour & water mixture, I suspect it might stop leavening properly. As the bacteria from the original buttermilk keep working they will acidify the culture, over time it could reach a point where the commercial yeast is inhibited, and if it is kept covered in the fridge there probably won't be enough wild yeast to raise the bread.
In conclusion...
If you or the person you plan to share this starter with is likely to feed/refresh it regularly with the buttermilk mixture, then by all means try it out. If not, you're probably better off just starting a more traditional sourdough starter. You can always add milk or buttermilk when making dough to get the flavor and texture you want without the risk of contaminating your starter.