Hi Gang,

I'm nuts for starters lately...I got 3 going!   Today we made a covered pizza with my first starter I started, I have 2 more on the ready!   I'm NUTS for the starters.  Tomorrow I'm making Chad Robertson's French Country Bread,  levain is rising as we type, but for now if you have time, please check out the wife's blog, she posted nice pics of the covered pizza!!!  you gotta try one

  http://jewelsinnaples.blogspot.com/2012/01/tonite-on-menupizzacome-oooona-cold.html

Cya,

Frank

Hello,

         I have decided to make a sourdough starter.

Using approx 15 grams of bread flour and 15 grams of fresh pineapple juice, I have created this

It has a consistency of thick pancake batter.

I have the starter in a glass jar, with a loose lid on top, and its sitting next to a rice cooker for warmth.

The last starter I made didn't seem to rise enough when I made bread, even after a 5-10 hour first rise.

My hopes are that this starter will be more active.

Kody

I have been researching some foreign recipes which involve translation. I have yet to bake these recipes as there is always something lost in translation. After much research I found an intriguing recipe that uses a yeasted poolish fermented for 12+ hours, ripe sourdough and fresh yeast in the final dough.  Does anyone have any recipes or baked bread that involves both a poolish/preferment and sourdough starter ?

i have been tryin to make a new starter since my old one died on my and when my starter was still in the growing stage i added a bit of sugar to "lift" i up a bit and well now it is quite active and doubles in about 8 hours and is less than a week and a half old. i havent baked with it yet but the day after i added the sugar it started to smell like bananas! sincei have a interest in homebrew beers and i know that this is a character appropriate for the beer style hefewiezen, which has some clovy and banana notes in it. also since my starter is a whole wheat starter at 100% hydration i think maybe that the same strain of yeast the resides in the hefe jumped into my starer from the sugar and gave me some banana? has anyone encountered this before? if so how did you deal/fix it or will it be fine?

Hi everyone, I am new to sourdough, and I recently made my own starter from a recipe I had in a book.  I made a loaf from it early this week and it was good! Mild, but I understand that's due mostly to the immaturity of my starter.  My issue is this, my starter is very wet.  I can stir it together and it is the consistency of a heavy syrup.  I've seen pictures of starter and I assumed it would hold together more, be like a soft dough.  Is there something wrong with my starter? Or is this how it should be?  Also, I have it in a Gallon jar to give it room, (which is way too big, I know!) I get about an inch of sugar alcohol on the top.  No weird colors, pink, green, or orange, and it smells just a little fermented, not rotten... Please let me know if these are normal for starter.  Thanks in advance!

If it helps, this is the recipe I used.

As part of my preparation to move from South Africa back to the United States, I dried my sourdough starter using two different techniques.  The first was to simply smear a thin layer of batter-consistency starter across some parchment paper and allow it to dry at room temperature.  The second was to mix flour into some starter until it was reduced to crumbs.  I found that a mezzalune was very helpful in the latter stages of incorporating the flour by allowing me to chop the progressively stiffening starter into smaller and smaller pieces while blending in more flour.

The finished product, two bags of crumbed starter and three bags of flaked starter:

That gives me one packet per suitcase.  Each will be appropriately labeled.  Hopefully, at least one and maybe all will arrive home with me. 

I'm interested to start rehydrating a bit of each to see which one comes back to fighting trim more quickly.  I'll post follow-ups when I can.

Paul

How long will a sourdough starter last in the fridge without being fed? We will be out of town for 3 weeks and I don't want to loose this starter. Should I freeze it?

Friends -

I'm traveling from Oregon to Maui at the end of this month and will be staying with friends I want to bake for. They've asked for sourdough, and I've seen some hints here for traveling with starter, but does anyone have advice for keeping it alive on a long plane flight?

If anyone has recommendations for bakers or bakeries to visit in Maui, I'd love those too. :-)

Toneweaver

These are #'s 4 and 5. I've made three earlier loaves, all successful, with similar oven spring. I've been experimenting with retarding sourdoughs. I'm so pleased with my Overnight Baguette's flavor and crumb--straight dough, retarded 15 hours @ 54°F--that I've reasoned retarding sourdough loaves should add sparkle to already good flavor. Using my old starter, the results were mixed. I realized excellent flavors, but the doughs were slack, and their oven spring weak.

With Debra Wink's help, we've saved my new starter--I thought it was a goner--and, encouraged by #'s 2 and 3, also retarded, I baked these today. The dough was retarded 10 hours, at 54°F, before shaping.

As you see, I've got excellent oven spring. I'm going to post a forum Help! re the ragged slashing. I've not been able to eliminate it. If you have any good advice please post it either here or on the forum thread; I'll title it Ragged Slashing. Sorry, no crumb shots, these are going into the freezer.

Here's a crumb shot of #2, which is almost gone. It's been a great compliment to some home cured and smoked pastrami.

David G

I had some extra starter (who doesn't?) and remembered a no-knead recipe that suggested substituting 1/4C of starter for the 1/4 t of instant yeast. I was surprised at the wonderful very obvious difference in texture and moistness of the bread. Is there a rule-of-thumb about substituting one for the other?

Jerry