May 14, 2020 - 3:03pm
Starter is is doubling rather quickly after 4 days but no longer smells sour
I'm new to sourdough bread baking and sourdough starters. Because flour has been hard to come by, I purchased some hard red wheat berries and whole rye and have been grinding them into flour. I started the starter with 100% rye flour but then started adding some wheat flour the second day. After 24 hours and for the first couple of days, it started smelling like sourdough. But by the fourth day it started doubling in volume (and then some) and started smelling more sweet than sour. The starter is very active, in fact I've started feeding it twice a day today, day five. Should I be worried that it doesn't smell sour? Will it eventually? Thanks for any and all advice.
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Some of the odors you were getting during the first few days of a new starter were probably caused by other organisms that have now died off as the sourdough microbes take over and stabilize. Rye flour will also affect it differently than wheat. If you pay close attention to your starter (which you should to get to know it better), you'll probably notice that it still smells more sour or maybe like alcohol just before you feed it, and more sweet or yeasty earlier in the cycle such as when it is at peak.
It sounds like your starter is doing well. If you bake with it and find you want more sour flavor, there are ways to tweak that.
Thanks for info. Really appreciate it. The starter definitely smells like alcohol before I feed it. This is my third attempt, I was using bleached flour the previous two times and they never got off the ground. I'm encouraged by all the activity this time and may try my hand at baking some bread on Saturday.
I love sour, so I'll probably want to tweak it, but we'll see.
Thanks again!