A warm hello from South Africa: My ... second starter
Hi,
Brilliant site, wish I knew of it 3 weeks ago.
After reading in a book about a sourdough bread, I felt like I had to taste some. After going to the local bakery to get one, I have to admit I was less than sattisfied with the taste. I now know why, as I found out today that they use ordinary yeast for their "Sourdough".
In any case, after a few slices of bread and cheese, I decided to make a sourdough starter, and after some reading on the net decided on the plain Water and Whole-Wheat starter. I got a reaction after 24 hours with some delightful bubbles, but with a smell of sour milk. As I have read about the various smells they go through, I kept going, feeding it twice per day as per the recipe. while there are bubbles, there is no rise at all.
However, the smell never improved, and actually got worse, and I actually binned the started last week. I again tried.
Same results so far, it was yesterday still in the sour milk stage, and I was getting desperate to bake a sourdough bread. Got to this website 2 days ago, and communicated with PMcCool yesterday that referred me the the Pineapple juice starter. I in the mean time had 2 starters running, one whole wheat (Last week friday) and a white-bread and Rye starter (started saturday). Both were in the sour milk stage.
So I went, got a few pineapples and juiced them all. Feeded the older starter with flour and the juice, and when I wanted to it some more, I learned that my 5-year old discovered the bottle of juice in the fridge and drank it ... So I fed it water and flour. The smell is a bit more pineapply and less bad milk, and the bubbles are definitely smaller. The dough is also a bit more liquid than I remember (50 grams flour, 50 grams water). Just checked it, but there is little activity it seems. So I am playing the wating game.
However, as I am in a hurry to bake some sourdough bread, I thought of going to a bakery to buy a starter. And to my surprise I learned that all of the esteemed bakeries use yeast to start their sourdough bread recipes. None of these bakeries had their own starters. I hope to get one from the local farmer's market saturday. It is just a rather big surprise that these bakers do not do a proper starter based sourdough bread.
Regards
Morne from a very warm and sunny South Africa