Hi, Grace. You ask some great questions here. As you're obviously discovering, using your starter before it's at its 90% peak level (your instincts about this are right on, by the way) will slow down how quickly your dough rises. This is further aggravated by the fact that you put your starter into a high-fat, slightly sweet enriched dough, which is going to be a slower mover anyway. Using the starter before its peak isn't a deal breaker, but you'll have to accept that the dough will take longer to rise; you might want to give the dough a couple of folds and an extra hour between mixing and shaping. The finished product will be slightly more sour, since the lactic acid bacterial will have had more time to do what they do. As for your second question, any starter that has any living yeast in it will eventually replicate itself to the point of exhausting the available food supply, given enough time while kept within the appropriate temperature boundaries. There are costs to this, however. Unfed starter in a full dough recipe could take as long as 2 days to fully ferment the dough, and while that's happening the starches in the dough are being consumed, the dough is becoming more and more acid, the gluten is degrading, and some of the carbon dioxide you're trying to capture is going to be lost. The result of a bread made that way would be a flat, sour, probably gummy loaf. The beauty and challenge of sourdough baking is in learning how to interact with your living culture and your dough so as to get the best results. Consider it more like a dance: the right step at the right moment creates a thing of beauty worth cherishing. Susan

• Reply