Apologies for sounding naive. I am new to baking and ran out of yeast last week. I am craving fresh bread since past few days and decided to create a starter from scratch on my own. I watched lot of videos on YouTube and followed the recipe by a channel called "Jake with Bake".
25 grams whole wheat flour / 80 percent purified water
Points to note:
- Started at 2 AM and PIC 1 is from 9PM same day
- It is hot here and temperature is 30 to 35 degree celcius
- The starter has doubled and I see lot of activity in less than 24 hours
- It smells weird and has these colored patches? I read about worrying about pink/orange color but cannot for sure makeout if that is pink or not?
I fed it 20 grams flour with same amount of water and next day morning I continue to see bubbles and activity etc.
I don't know how to explain what it smells like but it smells weird. A mix of rotten and vinegar-ish smell.
Should I have started new based on that 1st day activity? Am I going good? How often should I feed it or should I have discarded it completely and started again? Is that activity from 1st day normal?
Unable to add the photo to description. So pasting it here.
See Debra Wink's microbiologist's view of the birth of a starter on these forums.
Short version, what you have there is not unusual but it is not yet a starter, you have to carry on watching and feeding.
Yeah the Debra Wink posts are really good on this. Basically you're gonna have a bunch of stink and activity for a couple days while you wait for the pH to drop. Then it will become more liquid and quiet. Then you'll start to get toward a real starter. If it's too liquid after that point you can lower the hydration a tad.
You can speed up the process by lowering the pH a bit, e.g. pineapple juice. Though you don't want to lower it tooooo much, e.g. vinegar. And at this point that activity is lowering the pH, so you're already on your way anyway.
Further good news: you'll never need to buy yeast again.