November 28, 2016 - 11:32am
Sour dough starter
In the past I have made starter several times by letting a bowl of milk sit out covered with cheese cloth for 48 hrs. Always smelled like sourdough after a week. However this time it took me 5 tries before I could capture yeast spores an then it smelled terrible! Added rye flour, fermented better but still stinks!!! HELP!
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Hi, I'm rather new as well but seems that most people do best either using just plain flour and water or by replacing the water with a bit of pineapple juice the first day or so:-)
Good luck!
Try Debra Winks :Pineapple Juice Solution". The juice just adjusts the pH, the yeast and lactobacteria come from the flour. Find it by entering pineapple juice solution in the search box in the upper right of this page.
Ford
I could see using yogurt for the acid for the first couple of days, but I don't think milk alone helps. I remember some older sourdough starter recipes using milk, but really I 100% agree with Ford that the Pineapple Juice Solution is the way to go. I would start with part 2 and scroll down to the "Day 1" part. Mix what it says together, then go back and read what is written above it. Then go to part 1 to get the whole science behind it.
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/10901/pineapple-juice-solution-part-2
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/10856/pineapple-juice-solution-part-1
Or you can go here to start so you don't have to scroll as much, but do go back to the ones above for a lot more info:
http://forums.finecooking.com/print/node/63318?page=2&comment=737624
For best results, use pineapple juice, not the other juices mentioned.
that you are trying to capture from the air are already captured before you start. It is an old wives tale that they float out of the air and into your flour and water mix to make the starter. They are in the flour you use. They floated out of the air when the grain was in the field and colonized the flour that way. So no need to lightly cover with a cloth. Use plastic wrap to cover the culture. Just mix flour and water, whole grain flour works the best, with a bit of acid liquid - pineapple or orange juice for the first few days and all should be well if following Debra Wink's method.
Good luck - it would be a miracle if you got a culture going using just milk covered with a cheese cloth!
It just dawned on me you ONLY used milk! Why? Are you trying to make "yoghurt" then mixing in flour later to produce some sort of LAB starter from a yoghurt culture?
Anyway it wouldn't be yoghurt, just off milk.
Another way to get the pH down in your flour/water mixture is to include a pinch of IDY which will grind out CO2 and makes carbonic acid which at STP has a pH of around 4.8 (when the liquid is saturated with CO2) which is enough to suppress the leuconostoc. After a week or two some native LAB will come out of hiding and populate the starter. You do need to feed it occasionally, but until it gets going, feeding every couple of days seems to be enough.