Question about wild yeast starter
First, the lead in... I used both the gaarp and Sourdolady methods. The Sourdolady trial did not take. There was a wet top layer throughout the trial.
The gaarp trial did take. I split the result into two containers, just to be safe. When I did it, I took the top of the starter for one and the bottom for the other. They are now Fanty (top) and Mingo (bottom). My wife named them because she says my pets needed names. They are pets because they are alive, have special houses, and need care and feeding (and they kinda made a mess in the kitchen when I tried pouring them instead of spooning). Oh yeah, and because I brought two pets into the household without asking, I now owe a pet of my wife's choosing.
Fanty
Mingo
Both were handled and fed the same way with no cross contamination. So which one do I go with first (excluding the dead one)? Mingo because it is more bubbly? Fanty because it is less? Mix the two? Or...they really aren't different, it is only my perception?
My other question is the aroma. It doesn't really smell like alcohol to me. It seems to be a higher sweeter smell, more like ethyl acetate (a fruity ester). Is this OK?
I just started baking and this is my first starter. I got into bread as a logical extension of the search for the homemade Uno's Four Cheese Pizza. The search was successful and the best of the crusts was with Napoli Antimo Caputo flour (yum). However, Gold Medal was actually close.
Quadrifoglio
Personally, I would make two batches, one with each starter. If you aren't able to consume that much bread, use one now and the other for your next batch. As for the aroma, it will develop, as will the flavor, over the next several weeks. Your starter will work fine now to raise your dough, but the flavor won't peak for a while.
Are they both kept at the same temperature? The estery smell may be due to the yeast working at high temperatures.
The containers were stacked on top of each other in the pantry. If anything, they have been running on the coolish end of things. The house has been at 67-71 degrees F.
I'm from a wine background and ethyl acetate is a wine flaw. There are reported three ways that it is made in wine.
1)Ethyl alcohol and oxygen can interact to create acetaldehyde, which can react with oxygen to create acetic acid (vinegar), which in turn can react with ethyl alcohol to create ethyl acetate.
2)Bacterial contamination of the wine (by acetobacter) can allow the creation of acetic acid, which then combines with ethyl alcohol in the wine to form ethyl acetate.
3)Finally, ethyl acetate contamination can be created by yeast under stress as well as by many bacteria besides acetobacter.
The above was copied from here. http://winemaking.jackkeller.net/problems.asp
I'll take a guess that you are not feeding your stater properly. This could be that it isn't getting enough food or you are not feeding it often enough. We have in sourdough bread fermentation the by products of alcohol and acetic acid, everything that is needed to make ethyl acetate. Do you want to post how often you feed the starter? And the weight of the starter, and of the water and flour added at feeding?
I followed the schedule in the tutorial Starting a Starter - Sourdough 101, a Tutorial. The odor started around day 3 or 4.
Since then, the starter has been in the pantry and fed every two days, It has been 100g starter, 100g flour (Gold Medal APF unbleached), and 100g water. I will significantly shorten time between feedings and see if the starter settles down.
It would be interesting to see if that gets rid of the oder for you. I think if you have read the Starting a Starter - Sourdough 101, a Tutorial then you will know that starters can be unpredictable. You now at least have an idea where the odor comes from. I don't think you have anything to worry about and feeding the starter should take care of the smell.
Four Cheese Chicago style
I increased the frequency of feeding (Gold Medal APF unbleached). All of the starters went flat with almost no activity except surface foaming. The odor was still present.
Since it couldn't get worse, I added about 20g of Hodgson Mills rye flour as an experiment. I had used this rye originally. Eight hours later it has quadrupled. It still has the odor but it is growing again.
I added 20g of Hodgson Mills rye flour to another starter that is flat and has hooch on top. We will see what happens.
My first culture has a very fruity,delightful smell that my other cultures don't (I have 3) and it rises bread just fine. It doesn't have much tang but the bread is delicious, complex and sweet smelling.This culture is young so it is not always consistent in a rise time-sometimes it takes longer than other times.I am more likely to give these doughs a boost with a little commercial yeast but I don't want to give up the complex flavor it offers. It seems to be becoming more consistent as it ages.
I captured another wild yeast that right from the start had more of a "sweaty sock" odor and rose bread ferociously well with a real sour-dough flavor.It went for capture to bake in 9 days! Very active! Someone I work with gave me a great compliment that it was very similar to real San Francisco sourdough.I just captured and fed it and baked with it-I don't claim any responsibility in shaping it's characterisitics.It's a wild child!
The 3rd culture I have is a 70 yr old culture from a friend. She keeps it in the fridge and rarely feeds it and doesn't bake that often. I fed and nurtured that culture, which has a distinctly different smell from the other two but,again, in the "sweaty sock" category.It performs very consistently with a delicious but rather bland tasting bread.It is a consistent performer with shorter, more consistent rise times.
I bake every weekend so my cultures are kept out on the counter in a house that is 67F (cool) .I feed them 25 g flour (usually Gold Medal AP or Better for Bread) and 25 g water twice daily for a few days prior to a bake.
My point in relating all this is that there are many yeasts out there-all with different characteristics. Capture some,see if you like it, if you don't then change the culture (like you did when you added the rye-I suspect you actually started growing a different variety). Just feed regularly( 25 g flour and 25 g water twice daily),keep warm,stir vigorously and wait. Don't forget to discard a bunch of the starter before feeding to reduce the lactobacterial count and encourage the yeast to reproduce. Once it starts to rise double, it is ready to start rising bread.
Start baking!
The sweaty sock smell is Butyric Acid, I get the same smell sometimes in my starter. I did a google search on Butyric Acid and Sourdough. Butyric Acid really is a by product of sourdough fermentation. I'm not sure what it means when you smell it in a starter. Wikipedia mentions that when butter goes rancid you get that smell. There are also a number of other sources for the smell that I will let you check out if you are curious.
After adding the rye, it is quite possible that the starter is a different strain, but a related one. It still has the fruity solvent odor but quadrupled in 6 hours. The previous one was much slower to even double.
I tried it to make a loaf with this starter. It rose the first time in about 5 hours. It was slack and had open bubbles on the top. I went ahead and shaped it as an oval loaf. As it rose the second time, it just spread out like the blob and became very sticky. Another round file special.