What If I Need More Than Two Loaves?

Nosey,

If I have one batch of starter to use, I know I can make one or two loaves of bread, but can I make four? Ten? How does that work?

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Dear Karen,

My first thought was that it wouldn’t matter at all, it would just take longer for the dough to rise. On consideration, I decided that that is not exactly true.

Again, lets look at the question from the point of view of the little yeasty-beasties and their partners, the lactobacilli. Instead of thinking about this as a matter of quantities, let’s look at it as an issue of numbers.

I am a single, lonely little yeast, and I’m holding hands with an equally lonely little milk-eating bacterium. She is my friend, and we always work together. Usually she and I are surrounded by ‘Bill-yuns and Bill-yuns’ (thank you Carl Sagan) of our closest friends and neighbors. We weren’t always this way, though. In the beginning there were only a few of us, all dried out, and hungry and dehydrated, ensporulated, as a matter of fact, shipped through the mails in an unappetizing plastic bag. Our new owner fed us, cared for us, and cossetted us, and generally treated us like the valuable house plants that we are. We rewarded her efforts with veritable orgies of reproduction whenever she would feed us more starch, or milk sugars. She wasn’t interested in us, so much as all the gas and milk vinegars that we produced.

Nonetheless, we reproduce at a profligate rate, as long as we have some warmth, and some food and water. Still, my little milk-eating girlfriend and I can only make one copy of ourselves every few minutes. I can make another like myself, then we two will make four, and those four will make eight, and so forth, but that takes time. Simply putting a few of us in front of a veritable hog-trough of goodies, fresh starch and sugars, will not speed up our rate of reproduction.

If you need lots of us little critters, all at one time, you need to plan ahead. Instead of discarding or using the extra pint of starter when you feed your culture, just move all of us to a larger container temporarily. When the activity in the new bowl slows down, feed us again. We will now have doubled in numbers twice. (1 -> 2, 2 -> 4, 4 -> 8, and so forth) so instead of the pint you started with you should now have 4 pints. That is enough for six loaves, and a pint to keep as a starter. If you want to make ten loaves or twelve loave, save out your starter pint, and double the three pints again, to make six pints. Of course if you are feeding a whole herd of people every day, or bake large quantities of bread often, it would be a good idea to simply get a larger crock and keep a larger amount of starter, and just double the entire starter whenever you need to bake.

To double your pint of starter twice, it needs to be fed twice, and allowed to reach its peak of activity twice. To double it three times, plan on three feedings. You will still need to portion out what you plan to save for the next time.

It’s just simple math, Karen! Just one organism can eventually fill the surface of the Earth with its culture, but we only have to culture what we actually need at any one time.