To this day, one can encounter statements such as
- the only source for the starter bacteria and yeasts is the flour
- lactic bacteria San-Francisco has never been found in flour
- air has nothing to do with starter inoculation, microbes are not from air, they are from flour.
All of them are wrong. Flour, air, and everything else is the source of sourdough microbes.
Five years ago Flemish scientists used molecular source tracking techniques and successfully found sourdough bacteria everywhere: in flour, air, hands of the baker, on the surface of the bags of flour, and bakery equipment in two Belgian bakeries, in East-Flanders and in Luxembourg. They found lactic bacteria San-Fransisco in the freshly initiated from scratch starter from day ONE. It is always there. It doesn't appear out of nowhere. It doesn't even depend on the type of flour used.
That's why one can successfully initiate sourdough starter with flour and water (inoculation from flour), with sterile (bleached) flour and sterile (distilled and bleached) water (inoculation from air or from the human hands), with flour, water, and baker's yeast (baker's yeast contains both wild yeast and lactic bacteria), and from baked bread (it carries on its surface microorganisms deposited with flour dust in the bakery, with air, with bakers hands, handling the baked bread, etc. )
J Appl Microbiol. 2009 Apr;106(4):1081-92. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2672.2008.04094.x. Epub 2009 Jan 30.
Molecular source tracking of predominant lactic acid bacteria in traditional Belgian sourdoughs and their production environments.
"To better understand and control sourdough fermentation processes, it is important to know the origin and to assess the relative abundance of dominant LAB strains in spontaneous sourdough fermentations.
Isolates were collected from sourdoughs, flour, hands of the baker, bakery equipment and air in the bakery setting/
Sourdoughs produced at D01 and D10 (D01= Bakery from East-Flanders and D10= Bakery from Luxembourg) were mainly dominated by Lactobacillus spicheri and L. plantarum and by L. sanfranciscensis, respectively, and these LAB species also circulated in the corresponding bakery environment.
L. plantarum and L. sanfranciscensis detected in air samples from D01 and D10, respectively
L. sanfranciscensis was detected in the air of the storage and working room and on several surfaces in
the bakery setting, demonstrating that this LAB species circulates throughout the production environment.
Specific strains of LAB persist in artisan doughs over years and circulate in the bakery environment.
The importance of air as a carrier of LAB in artisan bakery environments was demonstrated."
They are everywhere.
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