Ever since we moved this spring, my sourdough starter has been sluggish, a fact I bemoaned to many of our customers when we opened in September. It was still working at a basic level, but I wasn’t getting much rise at all – definitely not doubling in volume when building up the starter or doing a levain and the loaves were pretty flat.
As I talked about my sourdough struggles to our customers, several suggested that water might be part of my issue, which seemed logical because the biggest change was that we’d gone from well water to municipal water.
Then a customer who takes his sourdough much more seriously than I (spreadsheets are involved) told me that he had experienced a sluggish starter at the beginning of the summer and did a thorough investigation to figure out what brought about the sudden change.
His research revealed that when his small town’s municipal water supply runs low during times of high water usage (ie, summer), his town starts buying water from the Hot Springs municipal water supply… And voila! He found the culprit. He switched to buying reverse osmosis water from Culligan and his starter was once again happy.
Immediately after that conversation, I started feeding my sourdough starter with bottled distilled water, mostly because that’s what I have on hand. (We use it in coffee makers because of the high mineral content in our water.) It took at least a week or two to transition, but my starter finally started doing its thing, doubling in volume and developing nice air bubbles. The loaves it’s turning out are finally light and fluffy, with a beautiful golden brown color.
I don’t think distilled or reverse osmosis water is the only type of water that will work for sourdough starter, though that’s now what I’m telling people to start with to ensure the best chance at success. Some of our customers use spring water from Kidney Springs, and that’s next on my list to try – it’s a three-minute walk from our store, so I just need to get over there and fill a jug.
I don’t know if it’s the chlorine or the mineral content or something else about our municipal water that was making my starter sluggish. Perhaps it’s not the municipal water itself and it’s the fact that we have a water softener (too much salt could definitely kill wild yeast, though that wasn’t the factor for our customer mentioned above).
Either way, my starter is happy again so I’m happy!