First time recipe
Hello
I've attempted sourdough a few times and have have always failed miserably. I want to give it a much serious go this time and actually not give up. I'm in the UK at the moment where its pretty cold most days (not freezing about 7-12C each day) which i believe will make things a little more complicated?
I've been working on a starter for the last few weeks feeding it (1:1:1) each day but I'm not seeing much activity. It barely seems to double at all and only has a minimum of bubbles present. I'm just going to keep going and start feeding it twice a day to see if I can get more activity.
What I wanted to ask the forum is, does anyone have a simple sourdough recipe (or a link to one) they could offer that would give me a good starting point. I'm a little overwhelmed with all the info out there. My ultimate goal is to make 100% wholegrain loaves but I'm wondering if this might be a bad place to start?
Thank you so much forum!
I hope it's not 7C inside your house! What is the temperature range where you are developing your starter? If it's much below 22C, the starter will be fairly slow to ferment and gently heating to 22C - 25C would be a better temperature range.
If the starter is rising, which it sounds it is, I would feed a higher ratio of flour and water to help it not run out of food before the next feeding. The exact ratio doesn't matter much, but I'd suggest 1:3:3.
For a starting-out loaf I suggest going with 100% strong white flour at 65% hydration. Then you can work towards more whole grain content. My reasons are that it's harder to work with high whole grain content and harder to get a good rise and open crumb. Get experience with the easier flour first.
Many people do get good rise and open crumb out of 100% whole wheat, but start as easy as possible. A simple recipe for a 65% hydration loaf would be this:
340g - strong flour
200g - water
120g - starter (100% hydration)
8g - salt
This will give you a tasty loaf with 400g total flour at 65% hydration including the flour and water in the starter.
After you can make a loaf from this recipe you think is satisfactory, you can start adding whole wheat 20% at a time. You will probably need to add more water since many whole grain flours absorb more than white flour - though not always. You may decide you prefer 60% or 80% WW better than 100% and that's fine. You can also try higher hydrations.
After getting the WW versions working, you can try branching out to other grains if you like.
Hope this helps.
TomP
Hi Tom
Thank you so much for taking the time to reply, that's brilliant info! I realised I should have expanded a bit more on temp. It's pretty cold outside but inside its about 15 - 20C, which sounds a bit colder than most instructional videos I've seen online. Over the last few days I've stuck a thermometer in my starter and it generally seems to be around 18C.
Would these temps be quite cold for sourdough and am I right in guessing it just might mean that my dough takes longer to prove?
At 18C yes, fermentation will be slower. The starter will take longer after refresh to be ready for use, bulk ferment will take longer, and proofing the shaped loaf will also take longer. Someone else can probably say better but it could easily be a factor of two compared with 22 - 24C. The starter might also not look as active even though it's perfectly fine.
It's also possible the flavor of the bread will be a little different from what it would be otherwise, but you may never be able to be sure about that.
I think TomP's right -- try feeding your starter 1:3:3 or so.
But, when you say, "I'm just going to keep going and start feeding it twice a day to see if I can get more activity", I would respond that you should try the opposite.
Feed it more, but less often, particularly if your ambient temperature is on the cool side. Maybe I'm daft, but I would think feeding it more often, if it's not yet bursting with energy, will tend to reduce yeast growth, not increase it.
Rob
I pretty much agree with Rob about when to feed. I wrote to feed it if it seems active - the OP mentioned nearly doubling, which ought to be all right for refreshing. The key point is, I think, that if the starter hasn't consumed much of its resources yet, feeding it will only dilute the concentration of the organisms you want to grow. This will keep the starter relatively inactive and give undesired organisms a better chance to take over the starter.
These other organisms might come from the flour itself, the water, or the environment.
You see how this might work when you realize that after you mix new flour into a starter or a dough there is a lag of usually several hours before you see any rising activity. If you keep adding flour and water too soon, you will mostly be in this lag time instead of allowing the mixture to develop..
Hello
I tried a bake over the weekend with my starter and it was a complete failure. There was no activity and over a 7 hour period where I folded the dough every hour it didn't increase in size at all and remained a wet mess. I think the main issue I am having is my starter just isn't getting going properly. I feed my starter but it never seems to become active. I might see a few tiny bubbles but nothing close to any video I've seen online of a starter that is ready to use in a bake.
So following on from some advice in this thread I've switched from feeding my starter 1:1:1 once a day to 1:3:3 every second day, but this doesn't seem to work. By "seem to work" I mean I don't ever really see any activity bar a few small bubbles here and there. The starter does sort of take on an acidic smell though and the top layer seems to form a thin "skin" type layer that is darker than the starter that is under it.
Do you have any idea where I might be going wrong here? I'm feeding it an organic Wholewheat rye flour and tap water.
(Thanks again for taking the time to reply)
If the starter is not nice and active, doubling in volume over some hours like four or seven, it's not going to be able to raise bread, either.
One possibility would be that the starter needs to get more acidic before the yeast can wake up and start to multiply. Adding some acid like pineapple juice can help in this case. But if yours is smelling acidic then that might not be helpful.
By organic "wholewheat rye flour" do you mean a mixture of whole wheat and whole rye?
I'm not sure for how long you have been refreshing at 1:3:3. If it's only been a few days then keep on for say a week. Otherwise, it will be time to change something, and the prime candidate for a change would be the water. We've heard from some other folks who suddenly got success after they changed their water. I would think some bottled drinking water would be a good starting point (although it seems that some brands are better than other for starters).
If the water has really been messing up your new would-be starter, I think you should take only a little bit of your current starter and feed it at a high ratio. The reason is to dilute whatever is bad about the water, and also to introduce a supply of new yeast organisms in case they were killed off by the tap water. Try - I'm guessing here - 1:10:10. Give a few days, stir it up several times per day, and when there seems to be a lot more activity than you've seen so far, feed it again at 1:3:3.
TomP's got good suggestions.
I'm confused that you're getting a dark skin on top after just 2 days. Are you leaving your starter completely open to the air?
Also: I assume you mean wholgrain rye flour -- which is great. If not, let us know what you are using.
It sounds like your starter is not super active at the moment. I wouldn't be afraid to leave it on the counter longer than 2 days before you feed it again. i'd try 3 days or even 4, stirring once each day, and see if you get bubbles and/or a rise.
Tom may be right about water. Tap water often contains chlorine, which slows yeast development. The flour could be a problem as well. I now use a locally grown & distributed brand because I have had national brands -- billed as organic and well within their sell-by date -- go bad and almost kill my starter.
If it's any consolation, though people write about getting a great starter in 7 days, it took me 2 months to get my starter going. And even then, it wasn't consistent. I took me almost a year to start to understand it and a year after that to understand how to keep it happy & healthy.
Enjoy the journey!
Rob
Whoa, wait a minute. If you are using whole grain rye, the entire description of how the mixture should look and act will be way off. Descriptions such as mine, or the ones one usually read on line, assume that your mixture is mainly white flour. Rye behaves very differently. Whole wheat will be less different but still probably not match the descriptions.
Months ago I used a little of my white starter to convert it into a whole rye one. It worked, and now I've got a rye sour (as it's sometimes called) sitting in my refrigerator. It's basically a sludge or paste. When I want to use it, I take some and refresh it with rye. This is for a 100% hydration refresh. Overnight this will ferment but I never see many if any active bubbles pushing up through the top. If I have smoothed the top of the paste, the top will kind of swell upwards but not dramatically and not double. What I notice the most is that looking through the side of the container there are in fact a lot of large bubbles to be seen, and that's how I know the process has worked. Sometimes if I leave the container out for another 8 or 12 hours some of those bubbles will break through the top surface.
If you are using whole wheat or a mix of whole wheat and whole rye, once again you will get more of a paste, but there may be more of a visible effect of rising and surface bubbles. Maybe.
So perhaps the dark layer on top is indicating spent fermentation and you have succeeded. That would be a fortunate thing. Although my rye sour sitting unfed in the refrigerator for weeks and months has not developed a dark fluid layer. I get those with white starters left alone too long.
If rye it is, here's a way to check out how effective it has become: use some of it to create a white starter. In a new container put let's say 10g of it with 50g each of white flour and water. and stir them up. Cover the container and let it sit on the counter overnight or for 6 or 8 hours. You could stir it up once if you are awake. Then refresh it again with white flour, say 1:3:3. These numbers are just suggestions and there is nothing sacred about them. By the second refresh if not before you should see plenty of classical rising, bubbly action, and the starter should be smooth, sticky, and elastic when stirred. This starter will raise a fine loaf of white or whole wheat bread.
If you use an all-rye starter to make a mostly rye loaf, as if it were a wheat bread, you will probably fail. Rye acts very differently. You had best read up on how to make rye breads, which are very different from wheat.
Once thing I forgot to suggest about the tap water. Many people including me use a filtering pitcher to clean up our tap water. Depending on what chemicals have been added to the water to inhibit bacterial growth, this can be all you need.
Please let us know just what flour or flours you have been using, preferably brands as well as types.
TomP
Rye, as I understand it, doesn't contain much yeast but does have a lot of lactic acid bacteria. A rye starter by itself may not be able to raise even an all-white loaf. Using rye wholegrain at the beginning when one is creating a new starter is helpful because the lactic acid bacteria will quickly grow and acidify the mixture. Apparently dormant yeast won't wake up until the acidity gets low enough (Debra Winks says the pH needs to drop below 4.1). After a few days the all-rye starter should be acidic enough. Then one should introduce white flour to inject enough yeast, which will wake up in the acidic environment and start to multiply and generate gas.
whoa, indeed.
Yes, we need to find out what Nbryant130 is making.
But I bake with a 100% whole rye starter. I keep it at 100% hydration & store it in the fridge for weeks/months. When I feed it, it generally doubles in size within 8 hours with lots of little bubbles. And I can make any type of bread with it. The yeasts work with any flour.
iow, not that diff than any other starter.
Rob
Rather different from my experience. I'm just getting into using rye starters, though. It could be there's a large difference between different ryes from different places and mills so far as starter behavior is concerned. Mine are always the pastes I've described, and when Stanley Ginsberg writes in a recipe to take some rye sour, add rye and water, and wait overnight or 8 - 10 hours, I always have to wait another 8 - 10 hours to get the appearance and volume he describes. Refreshing my mother sour hasn't changed this.
Did nbryant130 say what country he's in? If so, I don't remember.
My experience with my rye culture is somewhere in between yours and Rob's. I followed Ginsberg's instructions in The Rye Baker to create my culture. I used an organic whole rye flour from Country Life Natural Foods. I used that flour and whole rye from Breadtopia for ≈1.5 years. It mostly behaved as expected except that it was a little slower on doubling or leavening a dough.
I then used some Bay State Milling dark rye (note: some endosperm removed, high ash%) that I needed to use up. Because the dark rye is thirstier than whole rye, I used more water in the refresh. Recently, I've been using some Serbian whole rye that is more like a pumpernickel flour with larger bran pieces. Because of this flour's coarseness, it doesn't rise like with a fine grind flour; I see pockets instead of bubbles. It now seems weak for leavening but OK for acidification. So there may be something to the origin of rye flour.
I also made a rye sour following Ginsberg's instructions and it came out the same way as I describe above. I started out with some "Pumpernickel" flour from Baker's Authority, but now I've been using stone-ground rye from my local waterwheel mill. It doesn't seem especially coarse. When I sift out the bran it seems very close to Bob's Red Mill dark rye.
I now use a New York State brand called Farmer Ground Flour. Terrific stuff. Very coarse compared to Bob's Red Mill or Arrowhead Mills or Baker's Authority.
I started the starter using a combo of directions I found online at Perfect Loaf & Tartine Bread Experiment. I had many probs bc I refused to buy a scale & was severely starving my poor beast. Also, I was using BRM dark rye, which I have since discovered is quite sluggish.
Here's a photo log of yesterday's refeed of starter that has been in the fridge for 3 months. It took a little extra time to achieve liftoff:
1. 10g remnant of starter
image3.jpeg
2. fed 1:8:8
image2.jpeg
3. only a little movement after 5 hours at 20C
image1.jpeg
4. nice lift after 18 hours
image0.jpeg
One of the many things I will miss. The Union Square. Farmers market.
That's pretty much what I get too. Wait, wait, wait, and then eventually, all those gas bubbles, which I don't see on the top hardly ever.
if the seed hadn't been unfed for 3 months, it would have achieved liftoff in much less time.
Start thick - a dough like consistency is fine - let it thin out - repeat - in a few weeks it's a starter. Enjoy!
another tip to start of the starter is using whole wheat ruw flower. When I uses that I had a strong starter in a few days. Also feed it more that 1:1:1 like the othera mentioned
It should read whole wheat rye flower
Thanks everyone for the advice. Really appreciate it!
Beware "ricettedicaterina
Wow thank you so much everyone for your input. So much to read over and think about. Apologies Ive left this thread hanging I do shift work so hours are a little all over the place.
So originally I was using Doves Farm wholemeal Spelt flour when I originally posted this thread. I think my initial error was I was feeding it daily (1:1:1) and so as squattercity suggested that I might in fact be diluting the yeasts and bacteria and so should feed it more flour and water but less often. I ran out of the spelt wholemeal flour and switched to Doves Farm Rye Flour as I had seen this on the Bake with Jack youtube channel. I fed the starter 1:3:3 every three days and after a couple of feeds it really started to come alive. Lots of activity with tons of bubbles throughout the starter!
My starter seems to be very lively now and after a feed I will definitely see it double within 24 hrs.
I've attempted a few loaves am using the scraping method where I use all the starter I have leaving behind a few scrapings in the bottom of the jar and keep this in the fridge. Then the day before I am going to mix my dough I just add in flour and water (now using filtered water - thank you tpassin) to the amount of starter I need for the recipe and it seems to consistently start to ferment and ready to use.
So it seems we have all solved the starter issue, my next problem is when I have mixed my starter with flour and water (I am following the tartine country bread recipe) the mixture just seems to stay a wet sticky mess no matter how many folds I do or how long or short my bulk fermentation is.
In order to help all of you help me figure out what this next issue is what info do you need to see and should I just start another thread? Would this make it easier?
Glad to read that your starter is happy! Good work!
The spelt (you are using spelt here, aren't you?) is causing it, if there is a lot of spelt in the mix. If you are using a lot of spelt, I would start by using whole wheat instead until you get used to handling this kind of dough.
You can also reduce the amount of water which will give you a stiffer, less sticky dough that is easier to work with. I don't have my Tartine book available just now so I can't look at the recipe to see the details, so I'm just throwing out generalities..
If you have been holding back the salt until after the dough has a rest, put it in at the start with the other ingredients. This will help tighten up the dough.
Handle wet, sticky dough with wet hands. You will get much less sticking.
Your folds may not be stretching the dough enough. Look for videos about folding. Just remember, there are a thousand ways to stretch and fold and there is no one right way. The dough needs to be stretched, however it gets done.
If you get to the point of shaping a loaf, and you don't think it's going to hold its shape while it proofs, then roll it up again and make a new shaped loaf. This can stretch the dough enough to make it hold a shape.
It the shaped loaf still slumps too much, try to bake it in a covered pot that is small enough to prevent spreading. Or put the loaf into a loaf pan.
TomP