April 13, 2015 - 3:14pm
Starter issues
I recently bought a sourdough starter kit... I followed the instructions exactly and it's been about a week.. So far my starter looks really good but seems very thin... I just started my adventures into breads a few months ago so I asked a friend if my starter looked good.. She told me to try and bake with it... My bread has been rising for almost 2 hours but hasn't really doubled.. Could it be my starter..? Any advice would be very appreciated... Thank you..
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After 2 hours of gluten development and a couple, threee hours of bulk ferment it might take another 5 hours of proof time or more with a 1 weak old starter that is way to young to make a decent loaf of bread.
Patience leads to
Happy SD baking
See that's what I thought as well.. My friend said I should try but I well definitely let it sit a while longer... Thank you..!
A watery starter won't be able to trap the bubbles as they form, making it very challenging to determine its activity. If you stir in enough flour to form a soft dough, there will be enough structure to retain the bubbles. Then you can see it inflate and get a better sense of its readiness.
Paul
That's really good to know... I read somewhere that I could feed it just flour without water once to make it a little thicker.. Hopefully that will make it start to double in size... Thank you very much for the advice..!
My starter never doubles in size; there is too much liquid in it for that. But once you know what your starter looks like when it is ready to bake with, then it isn't really a problem. Also, even if you put your starter in too early, it will just take more time to raise the dough and perhaps give you a bit less oven spring, it won't completely ruin it. I keep my starter at 100% hydration simply because it makes things easier for me to calculate.
Something which has made my starter a lot more vigorous is to change the amount I keep stored and the amount I feed it. I used to keep a large amount, 200g of starter. But every time I baked I would only use 25g which I then fed to the necessary amount for use in the dough. This meant that every time I was only giving my kept starter 12.5g of new food. It still worked decently, but not as well as I would have liked. Now, I keep 100g of starter. I take out 50g and feed both 25g of flour and 25g of water, then I feed my levain a further 50g + 50g to make 200g total levain for use in my final dough Since my kept starter gets fed at a 1:0.5:0.5 ratio once every week or two, it seems to be a lot happier.
Now your problem is most likely that the starter is still too young, but I'd be interested to know how much you are keeping and feeding/discarding?
Well my instructions called for 64g of flour and 64g of water each feeding.. My friend advised me to double that... I've been keeping it on a plastic container but just noticed some green mold around the top so looks like I'm going to need to start over.. Every website I go to tells me something different than the last... I just stuck to what the instructions that came with it told me to do..
A really low hydration starter might triple. A very high hydration starter might not rise at all. And, of course, everything else in-between.
Then it depends on how much you're feeding it. A ratio of 1:1:1 or higher (recommended) then you'll get a good rise (if the hydration isn't too high) because you'll have fed it a good amount of fresh flour to spent flour. If you feed less then that then spent flour to fresh flour will be greater and it won't rise as much.
Then there is the type of flour you're feeding it. Different flours produce different bubbles. My whole rye starter rises much more then my predominantly bread flour starter.
There are so many factors one has to take into consideration. And not to mention your starter is still quite young.
This is my very first attempt at this so I'm sure I will get something's wrong... The instructions call for a 1:1:1 feeding so that's what I was doing.. I assumed it was still too young to bake with... Every website says something different.. Either way I found some mold in the top of my container so looks like I will be starting over....
Mould doesn't sound too promising but lets see. Probably just some dried bits that have gone off.
What were the instructions you began with, the ones that came with your starter?
Told me to mix the packet with 2 cups of water and 2 cups of flour... Then feed it using 1:1:1 daily..
Since water is denser than flour, using the same volume of each initially must have given you a relatively thin, watery starter.
When people here talk about feeding 1:1:1, 1:2:2 or whatever, they mean by weight; e.g. 20 gm starter, 20 gm water, 20 gm flour. Is this what you've been doing or are you still measuring by volume?
KristinaMarie,
I know you have made an investment in your starter both financially and emotionally but if there is mold, I would recommend tossing it and starting anew. Try growing your own before you re-purchase.
I am no expert, but I have generated five or six starters over the last 35 years or so and here is my experience. The one that took the longest to grow was white flour based. The one that was the easiest was the most recent - just rye flour and water. Within five days I was baking with the discard from feeding, with good results. I know that's young, but it worked.
If you have access to whole rye berries and a coffee grinder, I would go with that. If not, some Bob's Red Mill Dark Rye is supposedly the same thing. You can incorporate other flours once it gets going, if rye is not your thing.
There is much more expert advice in this forum to help you.
Good luck,
dobie
Good advice.
That's why I keep a quantity of backup starter in the fridge, to recover from just such occurrences.
The Internet is the worst place to learn to make starter. Too many pseudo experts.
Some are true, qualified experts and dispense scientifically sound advice; others just think they are and dispense advice conjured largely from the imagination, with no science or practical experience behind it, yet people applaud them for their questionable notions. The problem is, the newbie doesn't know how to distinguish between those who know what they're talking about and the self-appointed gurus.
on what mixinator said, I know from personal experience that it can be pretty tempting to try using multiple tips at the same time. Doing so can even work out - sometimes. In general though, I've found it better to KISS. I haven't had any complete disasters, but the cost common cause of my mediocre results has been trying to do too much at once.
If you decide to try making your own starter from scratch, look for a method that has worked for others, then stick with it. Don't try altering it when you have at most a limited understanding of what's happening to begin with.