75% whole wheat

The bottom.

The thing is, this is a new culture collected recently, I wrote earlier, "for a week" and that is a long time. It is fully developed now, mostly on whole wheat grain, and I notice a very strong acidic tang that is very close to vinegar and that does tend to dominate its complexity. It honestly tastes like plain white vinegar is added, but it is not. And it is quite strong besides.

This batch dilutes the whole wheat with all purpose flour by about 25% to 30% in order to tame the over fermented acidic-tasting sourdough sponge and to impart its stringy glutinous quality onto uncooperative whole wheat. The baked crumb is noticeably bouncier.

As to the starter, the levain. The culture for these two loves is gone now, in favor of the culture coming up behind it. 

You see how quickly this gets out of hand. This last round being shown produced enough sponge for two loaves before I am ready to bake any. The longer it ferments the stronger it gets. So I baked it a few days late in diluted form. I am getting a little bit tired of the extraordinariness of 100% whole wheat sourdough, so a little all purpose is mixed in this time. 

But there is another sponge that is even more powerful than this one coming up right behind it. That is the third Denver culture handled this season and the second collected this season. This first collection right here is powerful but vinegary tasting, the culture coming up behind it even more powerful. The latest one was collected for two weeks, an unnecessarily long stretch of time. When fed pineapple juice and fresh whole wheat flour the culture sprang to life in just hours at room temperature. When used to inoculate a sponge it inflated the dough surprisingly within hours. And now that one is fermenting. There is no way I can finish this bread right here before this last one trailing it, let's call it Profundo, is ready to bake. At any rate the Denver culture now resides in that later sponge. A portion will be reserved before it is baked and that will be the Denver line that is kept because it is so powerful.

So then, this new Denver sourdough culture collected in one week is already being retired. Why? Because another newer Denver culture collected ridiculously for two weeks is even more powerful. The anticipation is the culture will be complex and hopefully it will not have that distinct vinegar-tasting tang.