question to those who've baked using starters

I'm an old hand at baking using commercial yeast, but I'm on my first foray with a sourdough starter. I started my starter (there's a mouthful) about 8 days ago, and it smells right (tangy, yeasty), looks right (bubbly), and seems to be a perfectly healthy, active sourdough starter. While it's bubbling right along, it's not even coming close to doubling in volume. The house is on the cool side right now, and I'm feeding it every 24 hours. It's definitely expanding, just not as much as the directions said it would. Should I really expect it to double?

Here's my question: just how thick should my starter be (because I'm wondering if maybe it's too thin, and if that's my problem)? It's about pancake batter density right now (and goes a little soupy as the yeast finishes feeding). Is it still just young, should it be thicker, or should I just throw the thing out and start over? I'm hoping to try a loaf of bread using the starter this weekend, but I don't want to waste the effort if my starter is a dud. Any thoughts or recommendations?

Edited to add some more technical detail on what I'm doing. I've got the starter in a wide-mouth quart-size canning jar, and I'm covering it with a triple-thickness of cheesecloth (so it's protected, but able to breathe). It's sitting on the countertop in the kitchen (not in the fridge). When I feed it, I throw out all but 3 oz. of the starter, and feed it with 3 oz. filtered water, and 3 oz. organic unbleached flour. That's the directions of the recipe I'm using, but the batter just seems a little thin to me (but this is my first attempt, so how the hell should I know).

and while it imparted a great flavor to bread (nearly duplicating the Baldwin Hill sourdough rye I so miss out west), it was incredibly wimpy when it came to raising the dough and took 2 days to do what commercial yeast would do in a few hours.

I've used a pinch of commercial yeast along with the starter in subsequent batches and come up with a decent sourdough bread that didn't grow spiderwebs and a long grey beard before it rose sufficiently to bake.

Did the starter give it a sour flavor? It's hard to tell from just smelling the starter if it's going to be very sour, but I'm assuming it will.

I'm hoping to try my first bread this weekend from starter. I'm eager to see what everyone says.

I'm going to make a few tries at the scratch starter (if necessary) before I buy one; but I've got a couple of websites bookmarked if my homemade starter defeates me!

I'm not finding the link now, but it's in the thread about sourdough starter

I know her new job is really cutting into her DU time, but if you PM her she'll probably get back to you in the next day or so I'd think

edit to add one of her posts to make it easy

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=236x13974#13979

I've been trying to make time to check in with you guys, my cooking and baking friends, every day, there's always so much fun going on here!

thanks to your wise council last winter it came out great!

When you're ready to "kick it up a notch" for I'll give you something else to try that makes utterly "to die for" dinner rolls (loaves too).

I'm so glad you got your bread-baking skills to a point where you can consistently bake great bread, it's so satisfying to cut into freshly baked loaves that came out of your own oven.

I'll pm ya before new years though, I'll have a few days off to play

:bounce:

almost like bread dough. Comes out great.

Sourdough FAQ http://www.nyx.net/~dgreenw/sourdoughqa.html

You'll find that I wrote one of those articles in the Sourdough Faq - it's this one "What is meant by a "fully activated" starter?"

Actually, it has my real name on it so you wouldn't have recognized me there anyway! :rofl:

I find it easier to refer people the the FAQ then to write out long explanations. I have been working with sourdough for around 25 years. There are some things in the FAQ I don't 100% agree with but most of it fits with my experience. :)

The thing is, in general, if a starter can't double itself it can't double bread dough either...

Since the starter is bubbling and showing signs of life, it's not a dud but it does need some help to develop it's full potential.

I have a few ideas you can try. (Well, first you could try mixing a batch of dough for bread and see what happens with it... )

The method of feeding that you are doing is called "tripling" - you are starting with 3 oz of starter, adding 3 oz of water and 3 of flour, giving you a total of 9 oz, or triple what you started with. That should be fine but being that you're unsure of the starter, try doubling it instead of tripling it - start with 3 oz of starter and add 1.5 oz water and 1.5 oz flour. For a few days, say 3, do the feeding procedure 3 times a day. Like you, I like to us glass jars for starters. For a small amount like I am suggesting, you might want to work with a smaller jar - like maybe a pint size. I always screw the top on although not tightly. That way I'm sure there's not a problem with the top of the starter drying out and possibly becoming contaminated.

As you discard extra starter and build up from 3 oz each time, doubling with equal weights of flour and water, your starter should thicken up to a thick batter consistency.

One of the reasons I like feeding the starter is a glass jar is because I can more accurately measure it's increase in volume. What I often do is run a piece of tape vertically from the bottom of the jar to the top. Immediately after feeding I mark the tape at the level of the starter. To really get to know your starter, every hour mark the tape and the level of the starter and you'll learn a lot about the starter's cycle, how much it increases in volume and how long it takes for it to do so. This will be quite useful information as you begin to bake bread, so that you'll be able to schedule your baking time.

Now, all that said, there are a few things that can inhibit the yeast in a sourdough culture. The first one I want to mention is temperature.
You say your house is cool. It's possible that the particular yeast in your culture isn't happy at cool temperatures. See if you can find some way to give it a warmer place to rise. Many sourdough starter recipes recommend 85 degrees F. Ofen an oven (turned off) with the light on creates a temperature close to that, and many people ferment their cultures in that way. Others make some sort of proof-box either with a bowl of warm water that they change out as it cools, a heating pad, warming tray, or something of that sort. When I lived in cold, cold Colorado Springs, during the winter I used a styrofoam cooler and set a "reptile rock" in the bottom (bought at a pet store, one with adjustable thermostat. I've heard all sorts of creataive ideas for giving starters a more favorable environment.

Other inhibiting factors are salt, chlorine, and the pH of the water. You say you use filtered water. Normally that should be fine. However, it's _possible_ that your water is the problem.

I had trouble with a starter last spring and, after several weeks of experimentation, determined that the problem was with the water I was using. I tell you true, I tried a 6 - 8 different waters and finally found a mountain spring water and a distilled that worked. I live in Phoenix, where they add more salt to the water to combat dehydration. I don't know for certain that was the problem because I never had the water tested, but I can say for certain that the water was my problem. My starter was only increasing about 50% rather than the 100% I expeoted. 8 years of working with sourdough I'd never had that problem before, and when I talked to a bunch of old-time, well-experienced sourdough bakers, they were incredulous that the water could be a problem, but in that case it was.

I'd suggest that you start with a warmer place for rising and 3 feedings per day for a couple of days. If you don't see a noticable improvement, think about buying some different water to try.

This may be more than you really wanted to know, but... another thing about startes is that making great sourdough bread requires a degree of experimentation. You sort of need to become a scientist, keep notes of what you do and what your results are so that you'll be able to replicate what works.

I'm real curious... who's/what starter are you working with? Did you buy it or did someone give it to you? I've worked with many different starters so it's possible that I might have some experience with the one you have.

As far as consistency of the starter is concerned, it becomes a matter of personal preference. A thin starter will froth and bubble up on the top, while a thicker one will rise more as an integral entity. I've always liked working with a thick batter-consistency - well, mostly because I like the process of using equal amounts of flour and water. There are other reasons for working with different consistency starters, but we'll leave that for another conversation.

Good luck, please keep us up to date as to how it's going. Do you have the ability to take and post digital pictures?

Maybe I'll put the starter in the cage with one of the snakes, right over the heater.

No, I don't think so. :evilgrin:

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

adding cultivated yeast to the starter, but I remember reading somewhere that if you add cultivated to a wild starter, the cultivated will take over & you'll lose the wild, which was the whole point of going to all the trouble to start one yourself. Is that true? All I remember about the cookbook was that the author would sterilize his whole kitchen before making a wild starter because he did so much baking that there were plenty of cultivated spores in his kitchen.

:hi:

It has to do with the acids produced by the commercial yeast - the wild yeasts die off in that acid a medium. And commercial yeast won't perpetuate for years like wild yeasts will.

A sourdough starter is a culture where strains of wild yeast and lactobacilli live and thrive in a symbiotic relationship. As long as there is sufficient flour for yeast to bread down into sugars, they maintain a chemical balance where both thrive. It's possible that the culture can be contaiminated by other microorganisms that can kill one or the other (yeast or lactobacilli) off, but if a culture is fed frequently enough to stay healthy, a starter can thrive for years, decades even.

There are starter recipes that call for adding some commercial yeast and some, like the "Friendship Starter" can be maintained for a period of time. But commercial yeast isn't genetically designed to perpetuate itself ad infinitum. It's sort of a crap-shoot when you start a starter with commercial yeast. It's possible that a strong wild yeast can emerge and take over the starter, if so you could have a viable starter, but there's no controlling those things.

I had a friend who made vinegar in her kitchen where her starters sat out. The vinegar micro-organisms killed off her starters because they introduced a vinegar bactirium that the starter yeast and lactobacilli couldn't live with.

In most cases it's not hard to start up a starter, it's mostly a matter of time and some attention over as much as 10 - 14 days to cultivate a starter that strong enough to rise the bread and mature enough to have some flavoring development.

wow, you really know your stuff. Now, I'm definitely going to buy some of those starters.

:hi:

However, the starter I got from the red grape method was very wimpy when it came down to raising the dough. I found that a pinch of commercial yeast did a great deal of good to cut rising time while preserving the full flavor of the sourdough starter I ended up with, which is truly wonderful. Attempts at ceating starters with commercial yeast ranged from tolerable to awful, ditto the wild yeast method.

When yeasts metabolize sugar, they create alcohol. In an aerobic environment, they then break that alcohol down to acetic acid. Beers and wines are done in closed containers to keep the alcohol content high and the acetic acid as low as possible. Eventually the alcohol kills the yeast off, which is why you're not going to see wines of more than 10-15% alcohol. To get higher alcohol content in beverages, you need to distill it. Both acetic acid and ethanol are normal byproducts of yeast's sugar digestion, no other bacteria need be present, and high concentrations of either will kill the yeast. There are different varieties of yeast, though. Some are nice and some are quite nasty.

As for attention to the starter, I found that the best thing to do was to put the grapes, flour and a little distilled water into the fermentation container, loosely cover it, and not look at it or smell it for 10 days. I'm sure the mess would have caused me to toss it if I'd looked at it sooner. The natural wine yeast on the grape skins gave me a beautifully fragrant starter, just a wimpy one.

You can tell when a starter is bad because it smells bad. Toss it.

WOW--thanks for all the great info!

Well, here's my update:

Yesterday morning, I decided to go with my instincts and stray from my starter recipe. It's one I did from scratch that I found on the 'net--I have the URL at home, so I'll try to post that later. It's rye-flour based, and you begin substituting regular white flour for the rye after the first 24 hours (mine's now evolved to no noticeable rye content). Supposedly, wild yeast finds the whole-grain rye flour irresistable and makes a great initial starter.

Enough about that, though--here's what I did yesterday: I reserved only a small amount of my starter, and fed with a flour/water mixture that was MUCH thicker than I'd previously used (I didn't measure, just eyeballed it until I was satisfied with how thick it was). When my new food was up to the thickness I desired--in the neighborhood of 8 oz.--I mixed in the smaller proportion of starter I'd saved (perhaps 2 oz. at most), covered the jar again with cheesecloth and left it on the counter while I went out to finish Christmas shopping. When I came back about 3 1/2 hours later, HOLY SCHMOKES!!! My starter had gone berzerk. It had clearly doubled (actually, mroe than doubled) already and fallen a bit. I watched it throughout the day, and it rose a second time, and stayed doubled well into the evening. I don't know if it was using a smaller amount of starter, or using a higher proportion of flour, or both, but it definitely perked up the starter (and resolved my worries about whether it's strong enough to try using to make a loaf of bread).

This morning I started the first phase of the two-phase sponge my bread recipe calls for (again, URL will be posted later if it results in a decent bread). I'm at the office catching up on a little work right now, and am hoping it will have doubled and be ready for sponge phase 2 when I get home in an hour or so. If all goes well, I should have a loaf in the oven before bedtime.

I'll update again tomorrow. :-)

and kept it alive for a year. It did double in volume for me and the directions said to keep it at 85 degrees which I did in my warming drawer. I had to play around with the thickness, too thin and it did not double, same as too thick. Mine worked best the consistency between thick cream and loose bisquit dough. I accidently forgot it for a week though in my warming drawer when I had the flu and it croaked.

It's so cold in here, it's going to take a long time, but so far it's looking good.

they came out scrumptious!

thanks to housewolf, i make consistantly good stuff these days :bounce:

Hope it turns out wonderfuly for you!

more kicks since it's that time of year again...


http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=236&topic_id=6007&mesg_id=6007

for even more holiday feasting, for those who value such things as homemade dinner rolls (I'm for homemade EVERYTHING! I think anything homemade is better.... with the possible exception of Honey Baked Ham...). My sisters don't understand it. They're rather buy something than cook it. They don't understand that I love doing the work of it all, it's one of my gifts.

H2S

The secret ingredient - Love (long post)


I am often gruff and short and grouchy. (No short jokes, Sparkly! ;) ) I cuss a LOT. But I am also quick to laugh and make a joke. Sometimes the jokes are even gruff and grouchy sounding. But Sparkly knows me best and she says I'm a sap. I cry about puppies and silly movies. I cry at good news and bad. So yeah ... I am probably an old sap. But its who I am and I like me.

That leads me to food. (Everything leads me to food, but that's another story.)

Food is as elemental to being human as breathing, sex, and self preservation. Food can simply be fuel. Or it can be succor. It can be impersonal or as warm as a mother hugging her child. For me, it is overwhelmingly the latter and almost none of the former.


more at link........


http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=236&topic_id=4648

I made the Alaska sourdough bread from Carl Griffiths' starter website

http://home.att.net/~carlsfriends/

Recipe at the end.

I made half a recipe because I wasn't sure my Kitchen Aid would handle 8 cups of flour. It made a large loaf -- big enough for the larger size pan (not the standard pan), exactly what I wanted.

I allowed it to rise a bit above the rim of the pan, as per instructions. Then, I put it into a 375 degree oven (as measured on my thermometer). After 30 minutes or so, I checked on it. It continued to rise. I'd say it rose more than an inch. It's perfectly huge.

It smells great. If the texture is good, this will be my best bread ever!

(I should say that the rising times were very, very long. I couldn't get to it the second morning, so the sponge sat bubbling until the next afternoon (yesterday). The first rise wasn't done when I went to bed last night, so I left it until this morning. Then, it took hours more to do the second rise.)

This stuff is yeast on steroids!


Alaskan Sourdough BREAD

1 c Sourdough starter
4 T Melted lard (or oil)
1 t Baking soda
8 c Bread flour (approximately)
2 1/2 c Warm Water
1/2 c Sugar
1 T Salt

Combine starter, all the water, and 3 c flour the night before and place in warm, draft free place.
The next morning add other ingredients and knead till smooth and elastic. Place in
greased bowl in warm place and let rise to double. Knead down again, shape into loaves, let rise to top of pan plus a little and bake in greased pans in moderate oven -375 for about an hour till done. When it is ready it sounds hollow when thumped. Turn out on racks, cover with dish cloth and let cool.
This should work with a bread machine also, just adjust the amount of water (1 1/4 c) to reduce the volume as it will not take as much flour.
Depending on the flour, especially whole wheat, it may be well to add 1 pkg dry yeast.

I have tamed the wild yeast beasties, and lo, they did submit and work to make a beautiful sourdough for me.

Making a thicker food batter and innoculating it with a smaller proportion of starter seemed to do the trick this weekend. It was like starter on steroids!!

Throughout the day yesterday, I went through both phases of the sponge, the first rise on the dough, and the second rise after forming the two boules. I used steam at the beginning of the baking time to get the crispy, chewy crust, and finally pulled the loaves out of the oven around 11 p.m. We waited until the bread cooled to just warm, and sliced into it. It was beautifully risen, the crust was PERFECT, and it was nice and sour. The inside of the bread was nice and light, but I'd like to figure out how to get it "holier" next time. That's a minor complaint, though, and overall I'm excited with how it turned out. I think I got VERY lucky with my first go at this, so thank the kitchen gods for that.

I don't know if my starter captured the actual lactobacillus sanfrancisco that allegedly floats around in the air here in northern California, but it certainly gave the bread a great tanginess. The starter is now in the fridge where it'll get weekly feedings (and, unless my schedule is too crazy, weekly baking). This has been fun!

Hooray! Yipee! Good work!

You did good. Congratulations!