Finally, a working natural yeast starter!!!!

I killed off both my sweet levain and YW starters after lengthy travel last fall. I thought it would be easy to replicate -- NOT. Two fails with both Deb Wink's pineapple juice solution and dabrownman's YW. I gave up and didn't bake another loaf all winter. Just cookies, buns and muffins.

Well I now have a most active, young levain. There are two things I did to ensure success this time. Okay three if you count the time that I have to tend to things these days.

The first was I followed Deb's pina juice instructions to the letter, but went 3.5 days until feeding 50 g of the solution, 1:1:1 with WW flour. To back my chances, I transferred the remaining WW/pina solution to a clean container and again fed it 2 TBs pina and 2 Tbs WW flour. Now there was noticeable bubbling by day three, but the batch fed a fourth time had significant bubbling by day 4.5.

Now on day 3.5 I fed the starter 1:1:1  w/90F water. Sometime in the night, well after 12 hours it had more than doubled, hit the lid and deflated. This morning, I used the new starter to do another WW 1:1:1 and a second at 20g levain, 20g WW, 80g strong bread flour and 100g water @ 90F. I also used the 4x fed pina solution a 20:20:80:100 feeding, Forkish style.

The second thing I did was use small cooler with freezable water packs and loaded these with hot water, then added a pack heated in the mike:

This simple setup made it quite easy to maintain an 80F environment. After this mornings feedings all three builds doubled within three hours, with the last one more than doubling in three!!! The WW levain has stayed at double, but after eight hours the WW/BF build went to 3-3.5x volume. Keeping things warm this time really helped!

Well given my new found levain success, I have a YW build bubbling along happily now, a Forkish double fed sweet levain in the first starter build and a traditional lean loaf on the go. Baking bread in fun again.

Stay tuned, and Happy baking!

Brian