Welcome back everyone! Just as a reminder for everyone, these starters have been named the Larryboy starters in memory of my original starters which died after only six days of being first created. Last week was the last week in which our starters are going to be a part of this blog as last week, my starter samples were shipped off to Raleigh for their DNA to be sequenced, and their Rising Rates Experiment was conducted. So lets just right back into the science!
So lets update you all on the starters and what their life was like during their last week!
Since this was essentially the time period in which the starters were mature, just as they were at the end of their last update, there is not too much to update you guys on. The starters over this time period both continued to rise and fall over the course of the day twice as they were continually fed every morning and every evening at around 12 hour intervals. At each feeding, you could clearly see based on the line that was formed on the cup that by the time the starters were fed, that they had clearly risen and then proceeded to fall around a centimeter and a half each time. In terms of appearance, at each feeding, the starters were ridden with bubbles all throughout the cup and had hills spaced across their surface. When stirring the starters, they were both a thicker bread like consistency and the bubbles that were seemingly spread throughout the starter would stick to the knife (as in the video uploaded to the previous post on our starters) and also release air as they were being stirred that could be heard by my own ear.
So what changed about the starters, if anything changed at all?, you may ask! A couple things changed over the course of this last week. One thing that did happen is that over the previous weekend, I took a day trip to the mountains, and as a part of that, I had to adjust the feeding times for one of the days (September 12th – Day 14) and fed the starters after only eight hours. For a couple days after that I was actually really worried about my starters, because even though they were fully fledged adults, they seemed sick for a couple days and just felt more watery and less bubbly when looking at or stirring them. However, after the starters took a couple of sick days, they jumped right back to normal! . . . almost. It was after the starters jumped back from their little virus when I noticed that the starters had switched back to the experimental or cucumber starter being the starter that rose more, bubbled more, and felt thicker when stirred, rather than the other way around. If you can recall from the previous blog post about these starters, it was about a week prior to this in which the starters swapped to the control being the more active of the two. Honestly, the two starters have been playing leapfrog throughout their entire life on my kitchen counter in regards to which ones are more bubbly, thicker, and active. So lastly, what about the smell? While the control starter continued to smell more and more pungent and just like that of a sourdough starter with a bit of sharpness, the smell of the experimental starter had another change. It took me a couple days to figure out what I was smelling, but eventually I figured it out (September 16th)! Does anyone want to take a guess at what it is? Well, if you guessed that the experimental starter began to smell like red wine (not that I would know anything about that beverage) then you are correct!
Phew . . . That was a lot of talking so how about we take a break from reading and look at some pictures of the starters over their last week of being a part of out daily lives as it is again at the end of this week that the starters retired from the research business. Below will be their feeding schedule and the best of the pictures from their daily photo shoot. Please keep in mind that the control starter is always the starter on either the left or the top of the images!
Days 12 – 18 a.k.a September 10th – September 16th
Left Photo: September 10th – Feedings at 12 noon and 12:15am / Right Photo: September 11th – Feedings at 12:30pm and 11:30pm
Left Photo: September 12th – Feedings at 7:45am and 10:15pm / Right Photo: September 13th – Feedings at 11am and 11:30pm
Left Photo: September 14th – Feedings at 11:30am and 11pm / Right Two Photos: September 15th – Feedings at 11am and 10pm
Both Photos were taken on September 16th – Feedings at 9:30am and 10:30pm
Alrighty, so I guess it is time to officially announce that my starters have retired from work as research assistants/participants and have moved on to the next life. Only some of the control starter chose to stay behind and assist in my dad’s attempts at making actual sourdough bread. I promise to keep you guys posted on that if my dads attempts at making bread amount to anything worth documenting beyond this but here is his first sourdough attempt! He for sure did not want those starters to all go to waste!
So lets move on and discuss the Rising Rates Experiment . . . the one and only documented race between my two very competitive starters, the control and the experimental a.k.a. the Official Larryboy and Sly as Red Wine!!!
Now when I said race, I really meant sprint; in a matter of only five hours, a small amount of time compared to which us in this class thought this battle between the two starters would last, these two starters had risen and fallen an obscene amount! So lets dive right into this fascinating story!
Lets first discuss how the experiment was conducted. How I set it up was by first placing one scoop of each starter into a new cup, each with an added one and a half scoops of flour and one scoop of water. Then after stirring those ingredients together and scraping down the sides I marked the initial height of the starters, or what we should call the baseline height. Then, I checked my starter every hour and a half to two hours until the starter stopped rising and marked/measured the height at each of those time stamps until the starter was no longer increasing in height (peak height) as I expected my starter to rise quicly as it had been rising within six hours of being fed for the past week. Unfortunately, as my time constraints in completing this experiment were originally short and during a time period in which I was incredibly busy and out and about every day, and as we all expected for the starter to actively rise for longer than they did, I have only a few photos to share with you about this experiment. So below, I will share with you the table of data that I collected during the experiments, the few photos that I have of the experiment, as well as the graphs that my groups members did in reference of the data I collected comparing the control and the experimental starter.
Table of measurments:
Time of Day Control Height Experimental Height Time Point
9:30am 1.9cm 2.2cm 0 min
11:00am 2.8cm 3.4cm 90 min
12:30pm 3.5cm 4.7cm 180 min
2:30pm 5.3cm 6.1cm 300 min
Photo on the left is a photo of me putting the starters together and the other two offer differeing angles to show the marks that were made at each time for the heights of the starters as well as the appearance of the starters after they had fallen quickly from their heights (control on the left).
In terms of observations that I made during the experiment, the one that I made were that these starters, after receiving their huge feeding, rose like it was a sprint to see who could reach the moon first, and in the process of rising and falling faster than I had ever seen my starters rise before, they were riddled with a quantity and size of bubbles larger for their small size than I had also ever seen in my starters before. It was also pretty clear that the experimental starter rose higher and at a higher rate than the control starter.
So lets look at some graphs of the data!
Graph done by Patrick Veazie – Link to Blog:
Graph done by Yasmine Boufedji – Link to Blog: https://ykboufed.blogspot.com/2020/09/824-sourdough-starter-beginnings.html