Morris, and a rye starter filmed by someone else
Morris is my sourdough starter. He lives in a one-litre jar on the shelf beside the kettle, gets fed rye and white flour in roughly equal parts, and has been going for longer than I have had this kitchen. I did not name him with any ceremony. The jar used to hold a brand of marmalade with a man called Morris on the label, and after a week of calling it "the Morris jar" the name had moved from the glass to the contents.
He is a reliable culture. Fed at 1:1:1 in a kitchen at 20 °C, he doubles in about five hours and peaks at six. I know this because there is a rubber band around the jar and I check it. What I have never done is watch it happen, because nothing worth watching happens in any given minute. You look at the jar, nothing; you look again two hours later, and it has climbed.
So I was oddly pleased to find that someone on Wikimedia Commons, David M. Jensen, had pointed a camera at a 100% rye starter for ten hours and sped it up 1200 times:
A few things worth looking for:
- The first stretch looks like nothing at all. That is the lag phase, when the yeast and bacteria are waking up in the fresh flour. It is the part where I usually decide the starter is broken.
- Around the middle the surface starts to dome and you can see bubbles opening against the glass. Rye does not trap gas the way a wheat dough does, so the bubbles are small and the top looks more like porridge than foam.
- Near the end the rise slows and the dome flattens slightly. That is the peak, and it is the moment you want to be using it. A starter that has collapsed back down has eaten most of its food.
Morris behaves similarly but a little more vigorously, because the white flour in his diet gives him more gluten to hold the gas. He also smells less of rye and more of green apple and yoghurt. When he has been neglected for a week he smells of nail polish remover, which is a sign of hunger rather than death, and two feeds bring him back.
I am not going to film him. A rubber band and a pencil mark do the job, and the jar is in a corner where the light is terrible. But it was nice to see what the corner of my eye has been missing.