Ask Allie

What is “Ask Allie”?

Ask Allie is our fermenting-related advice column, where you can ask all your fermenting, cooking, baking, and pantry-related questions to get digestible answers! No question about food is off limits!

For those of you who are still having some trouble finding the activation pages, please use this link for those pages. Although many of you will receive an emailed reply prior to your question hitting the blog if I think you need an immediate answer, “where are my activation instructions?” is the one question I am no longer answering when it’s submitted. This is because we have links for it all over the website now, including the announcement section (where you get the promo codes) at the top of the homepage.

To have your question answered in Ask Allie posts, please use the form on our website. If you prefer to be anonymous, just say so in the form and we’ll leave your name out when we answer it in the blog!

For troubleshooting active issues with a culture you’re working with, please write us at support@positivelyprobiotic.com - you’ll get your answer faster that way!

Hi Allie, I want to order starter but have an unusual question. Is it possible for coronavirus to have been captured or cultivated into starter? I was about to order and had a friend caution me. Thank you!

— Jan

Great question, Jan, although it’s sadly impossible to answer because we just don’t know enough about this virus yet. What we do know, however, is that experts are clear that they have not found a single bit of evidence that this virus can or will be transmitted through food. The current official stance is that it’s unlikely, albeit requires more study. What we also know is that without a particularly massive number of hostile microbes, fermentation cultures are generally able to keep them from infecting a culture by sheer virtue of numbers. This is why people used to ferment water from the Thames (and apparently still do) into beer to make it safe from ungodly numbers of pathogens. It’s also the reason sourdough starters tend to be capable of living an astonishingly long time under neglectful conditions without developing mold or later making people sick once revived and used. It’s also worth noting that during the SARS and MERS pandemics, there was no evidence of food-borne transmission - since they’re close cousins to our coronavirus, things look okay on that front.

That said, our cultures are produced in a clean, routinely sanitized facility with high attention paid to all safe food handling recommendations. This has always been our standard, and always shall be so. What experts have said about food with this virus is that even if it does turn out to be possible for Covid-19 to be transmitted in this fashion, these critical food safety protocols being followed are the very things that would stop that from turning into a Typhoid Mary (Typhoid Sabrina? haha) situation in any facility that produces food.

After activating my thermophilic skyr culture, do I store a couple tablespoons in the refrigerator or the freezer?

— Pat

The first time you make your skyr, both. You want to always have at least one backup in the freezer in case something goes wrong. We’ve all got those days where we shouldn’t have been fermenting, after all. After that one or two you save in the freezer, it’s up to you how you store your reculturing portion!

Hi there! I’m working on the sourdough starter and am on day 5. When you remove part of the starter, you mention to use it in brownie mix. I don’t have any brownie mix. Do you have any other recommendations? Should I add flour and water to the starter I removed?

— Veronica

Any brownie recipe is fine. I personally just add it in without modifying the brownie (or mix) recipe, because I have a hard time seeing a good reason to do otherwise. You should feed your starter after discarding, yes. Ideally you will feed it daily.

I only want to use 1/2 of my sourdough culture until I can get better flour. Does that change the measurements of flour and water in the recipe?

— Kris

Nah. I always tell people to tuck half in the freezer and proceed as though they hadn’t. It all works out the same in the end. As I work through all of our cultures, I never use more than half of the packet (sometimes I use a lot less, to be honest). Since I tend to use up all my starter in the jar when I’m ready to test a new one, half packets ensure I don’t later have to bug Sabrina to send me more of stuff I should already have.

 I was attempting a rye sourdough starter. I missed the day 5 & day 6 feeding. It smells terrible, like chemicals. I have been keeping the cast off in a sealed container in the fridge. Is that revivable? It hasn't been feed but it's been really cold technically slowing it down right? I took 50mg out and fed it 1:1:1. It's on the counter now. This is my first time. Should I throw everything away?

Do we just feed without removing anything for several days? The "castoff" I put in the fridge after the first feeding which I think maybe I wasn't supposed to do. So it's not really a strong base. If that's okay I'll get back to feeding. I'm such a visual learner that this was more challenging than I expected

— Carissa

They do that sometimes when you skip feedings, Carissa. My oat starter has been treated really poorly by me recently, and WOAH the nasty smell! To be fair, that one is stinky no matter what. I’m just dealing with the increase in funk by baking smelly loaves (because I’m not willing to waste that flour!) right now, but the loaves do taste great despite the smell, and each loaf is less smelly than the one before it. If you want this process of refreshing the sourdough without having to deal with smelly loaves, throw away your discard and keep feeding. It should even out within a week, in my experience. Basically what happened, though, is that the starter is currently unbalanced because it’s hungry, and the smell is there to tell us both to step up our game.

Regarding the discard in your fridge, I would pull it out of the fridge and give it 3 feeding cycles. Because yes, it is just sleeping in the fridge, not dead – I have a starter that’s been in my fridge since January when I started with PP, and it will just need some refresh cycles whenever I get back to it. Then, either tuck it in the freezer or dry it out to store (or you can just use it if you’ve already thrown away or baked the smelly stuff). You dry by spreading thinly on a tray with parchment paper, or just on something plastic. Sometimes I use a plastic tray if it’s a lot, but if it’s just a bit then I spread it out thinly on the bottom of a plastic bowl and let it air dry. It will start to pull off the plastic on its own when it’s dry.

Anyway, you can keep the smelly one AND the discard in your fridge if you want to – so that’s the good news! No matter what route you choose to go, try to keep in mind that having a starter is like having a pet. It will get mad and show it if you don’t feed it. But like most pets, it’ll also forgive you once it sees you’re back at it!

Yes, you can feed without removing anything as discard. I don’t actually believe in discard, because discard is just starter that needs to be fed (by putting it into bread dough, brownie batter, cake batter, whatever you feel like that’s being baked and might benefit from that flavor profile). The reason we recommend that you do discard (which is often easier for people than baking with an unfed starter is) is because with each feed, the microbes increase in numbers. Accordingly, if you don’t proportionately scale up the feeds (mostly this is just the flour that’s relevant, but obviously it will need enough water to keep it around pancake batter thickness), you’re not actually feeding all the little guys who live there. Doing this process of scaling up the amount is how you increase the volume of starter without starving it out, and it’s what you need to do if your recipe is asking for much more than 50-100 grams. For most of the sourdough recipes in the blog, building up the volume of the starter will be needed, so I’d say to just get back to feeding. Put between 1/3-1/2 the volume of starter’s worth of flour into the container for the next feed, then once it’s mixed in, put in (do this in small increments) enough water to get it thinned down to pancake batter consistency. You’ll do this daily until you’ve got enough in there to bake your family project bread plus a bit more so you can feed the bit that’s leftover again.

Also, since you’re a visual learner, look on YouTube for Bake with Jack channel (he’s way too excited and adorable to not have a great channel), and also the San Francisco Baking Institute. Both of those channels do some really exceptional teaching videos, though not always specific to sourdough. They also both tend to avoid the kind of haphazard, free-form baking that I favor (think granny here with the “little of this, little of that” nonsense), and that’s also helpful for some people when they’re starting out.