The Fresh Loaf

A Community of Amateur Bakers and Artisan Bread Enthusiasts.

Sulphur smell

Lmw4's picture
Lmw4

Sulphur smell

I just reconstituted a starter from a purchased dry started. Started on Thursday and by last night it looked good to go.

I built a levain last night and this morning when I stirred it down for mixing the final dough it had a sulphur odor which quickly went away.  The bread is baked and smells pretty good.

should I be worried that the starter was contaminated with a worrisome bacteria?  Not sure if I should toss the bread. 

any thoughts?

idaveindy's picture
idaveindy

1.  Even when you build a starter from a dehydrated culture (that is, not creating one from scratch) it can take  7 to 14 days from the time you rehydrate it before it "balances" and "matures".   "Balancing" between lactic acid bacteria vis-a-vis yeast, and "maturing" as to which strains of both the LAB and the yeast become dominant.   I suppose it can take some days before the LAB creates enough acid to kill off everything that is not "good LAB" and "good wild yeast."  Anyway, bottom line: time is always our friend in creating/rehydrating/feeding starters.

2.  Different strains of LAB and wild yeast have differing aroma profiles. And it changes as the ratios of the strains change.    One thing about one starter I used was the slight sulphur-like smell it had.  Maybe others would call it "musky", but personally, I just preferred another starter.

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If your dough smelled okay throughout the bulk ferment, folding/shaping,  final proof, baking, and cutting open, it should be good.

You could ask the seller of the dried-starter if a sulphur smell is normal for that strain.   If the smell remains, and you just plain don't like it, you could always buy another strain or brand, or create your own out of whole wheat flour or rye flour.

Lmw4's picture
Lmw4

Thanks!  I left a message for the seller thinking that would be a good idea.

The bulk ferment smelled fine, and the baked bread smells fine.  It had a pretty good lift and the crumb is nice.   But it sounds as though I might have rushed the bake.  I held some of the levain out and fed it.  I’ll keep that process going for a while longer and see what happens.

Thank you so much. 

Martin Crossley's picture
Martin Crossley

Any starter pretty quickly becomes 'unique', according to the way you feed it and keep it. All this stuff about staters being handed down through generations since the ark is appealing, but regrettably hokum.

Reality is that every starter contains minority representatives from just about every strain of wild yeast and LAB under the sun - and this diversity is renewed every time you add fresh flour. From there on in, it's just about 'survival of the fittest': the strains that grow fastest in the conditions you provide (temperature, type of flour, mineral content of the water, frequency of feeding etc. etc. etc...) come to dominate. But the rest are still there. So almost regardless of what was in the dried stuff you bought, within a month your culture will be something completely different - and very similar, if not identical, to what you would have ended up with if you started from scratch.

So just keep feeding and discarding, and if the the sulphur smell is coming from the starter then I'll bet that it will go away!

idaveindy's picture
idaveindy

"So almost regardless of what was in the dried stuff you bought, within a month your culture will be something completely different - and very similar, if not identical, to what you would have ended up with if you started from scratch."

That may be generally true, but it is not everyone's experience.   Several commercial outifts manage to maintain unique starters in their inventory.  www.sourdo.com being one.

Using refined white flour as opposed to whole wheat is said by user "chefcdp" (of the 1847/"Carl's" group) to help keep a starter original to its beginnings.  

I've used 3 different purchased-starters, sequentially (not at the same time) for months and they maintained their different characteristics.

I realize others have had different experiences.

I finally did one from scratch, using old whole wheat (11 years old, but milled recently) to start it, and white store-bought flour to maintain, and will report results.