New day... *sigh* new starter
I let the daily feedings lapse on my wonderful original starter, and by Sunday morning it had a fruity smell to it. I didn't think it was a bad smell, but it certainly wasn't sour! It almost had a pineapple scent to it. Perhaps I could have salvaged it, but didn't decide to try. I tossed it out, and started over. I still used the yeast recipe from before, but this starter is quite different from the original. I don't like it as much; it doesn't please me with a redolent yeast or sour smell. It's a good starter, don't get me wrong, but it's just not the same, and can never be. I'll keep working with it, however, because I really want to continue to learn about the art of making good sourdough bread. The last loaf I baked look like crap, rather greyish, but had an awesome flavor. Some people pronounced it too sour for their tastes, but I had two requests for starter offspring as well.
I use whole wheat flour for the beginning few days of the starter; after the commercial yeast has been halved out, I'll use rye flour for the maintenance feedings. I think that, at least in my area, rye flour mixes with the wild yeasts in the air most successfully, and I end up with a highly flavorful sourdough bread.
I read some comments concerning hooch, and I understand that it's not safe to drink in and of itself, but othewise I have just stirred it back into the starter before feeding it. Some folks recommend pouring it off, but if it's part of the starter, then I'll keep it as part of the starter. I noticed that once I started using rye flour for the maint. feedings, the hooch didn't form.
By next week I should be ready to bake from this starter. I'll try to add photos of any resulting loaves, not to brag but to ask, "What can I do to make this look better?"
Till then ~
Robyn
Comments
It isn't that you can't bake bread by feeding commercial yeast, clearly you can. But in the attempt to prevent new bakers from becoming confused or misled, I have to point out that you are most definitely not creating a starter. I won't get into the science but if you want to create a starter I suggest you purchase a bag of Whole Wheat flour and a can of unsweetened Pineapple Juice. Read the most informative post by Debra Wink HERE that will tell you just what to do. In a few days to a week, you will have a real authentic natural yeast starter.I suggest you read the article but if you are impatient, jump to the bottom half where the formula is.
Hope this helps.
Eric
Thank you for the education Eric. I'm happy to learn that the stuff I cultivated and cared for for six weeks wasn't starter, so that the wonderfully sour breads that I baked from it weren't sourdough breads. What did I do wrong to get that amazing sourness going?
All sarcasm aside, I used a recipe that called for 2 tsp commercial yeast and 2 tsp sugar, and I used it again because of my success the first time. I read a lot of tutorials on starter, believe-you-me, and since the packaged sourdough starter mix bombed on me so immediately, I was very insecure about going the purist's route. If this one takes off, then perhaps in time I'll try the more traditional method of just using flour and water.
I haven't continued to add yeast to my STARTER. Once the primordial ooze shows signs of life, I stir it, remove half, and then feed it with flour and water, that's it. It takes nearly a week, but the yeasty, bread-dough scent is eventually replaced by a nice sour scent, and then it's ready to bake with. After a month, I had a wonderful sourness from rye flour feeding, and I hope to get that going again in a month or so. The warmer weather should help, so one change I need to make is to feed in the morning and let the warm spring air help.
Robyn
I hope you understand that I'm not trying to be snooty or dis respectful of your process. In the time you invest into your process you could have a genuine sourdough starter that will be healthy, resilient and super active in a very short time.
No sourdough starter begins with commercial yeast and sugar. Whole grain flour and water are all that is required but as thousands of people can attest here, the pineapple helps lower the pH to avoid the nasty bacteria from getting a start. Once the starter culture is stable, it will survive in the refrigerator for Months if need be. The culture is hard to kill. I've never had one that I couldn't revive from dormancy and it only takes a scant 1/2 tsp to feed up into what ever you need for baking.
I'm not a fan of the packaged starters for sale or free for that matter. It is too easy to get one going and then you know the source.
Eric
Eric, I do have one serious question for you: What makes my yeast-based starter ineligible to be called genuine, and your pineapple juice-enhanced starter eligible to be called genuine?
That's the crux of my argument against your pronouncement that what I have is not genuine starter.
If genuine starter is nothing more than flour and water, then neither your nor my starters are genuine. However, historically speaking, nobody used pineapple juice in their starter.
Robyn
Robyn, you were hoping to produce loaves with a pleasing flavour, and this is achieved by adding a culture to the final dough. (I'm using the term "culture" here to try and be neutral!) This culture consists of flour (= grain = food), water, yeast and bacteria, and it's the balance and identity of these components that lends to the distinctive character of one's culture. As the microorganisms feed on the grains (say, wheat or rye), they break down the natural sugars in the flour to generate organic acids as well as alcohol byproducts, the combination of which ultimately produces flavour.
When a culture begins with flour, water, commercial yeast and sugar, the commercial yeast opts to feed on the sugar first as an easy food source; you can think of sugar as yeast's junk food. The limit in this approach is that commercial yeast consists of solely one type of yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae. How is that not as desirable for your goal? Consider a culture that begins with flour and water only. Grains of flour are covered with many, many wild yeast that are, because they have no external "easy" food source such as added sugar, forced to feed on and break down the sugars within the flour instead. You can imagine how many different types of natural/wild yeast collectively feeding on the flour will result in a more complex tasting loaf, because each type of yeast will generate a slightly different organic acid flavour profile. That's the idea behind making a starter with flour and water.
What I suspect happened with your "wonderful original starter" is that when you switched to flour and water only and left out the commercial yeast, the wild yeast present in your flour gradually took over as the dominant population of yeast with subsequent feedings (vs. the commercial yeast). You noticed it yourself when you commented that "...It takes nearly a week, but the yeast, bread-dough scent is eventually replaced by a nice, sour scent."
Commercial yeast is more "reliable," in that once you activate it with a bit of water it starts feeding like gangbusters and you can immediately see the culture growing. However, if you want good flavour, then why not just begin with flour and water? Wild yeast take a bit more time to get up and running, and there's a chance that undesirable bacteria can take over in early days. You can help prevent this by lowering the pH (raising the acidity level) of the culture because the natural yeast can grow better at a lower pH than those undesirable bacteria. Eric mentioned the Debra Wink post, because Debra noticed that one way to lower the pH and encourage the wild yeast to grow (and discourage growth of nasty bacteria) is by using unsweetened pineapple juice.
I have one last thought to offer: you said that your wonderful original starter had a fruity, pineapple smell to it - not a bad smell, but certainly not sour. Instead of tossing it, I suggest (if it ever happens again) to resume the regular feedings and see if your starter becomes itself again. Starters are resilient things - with one or two feedings, it's very possible that you wouldn't have had to go through the trouble of raising a new starter again!
I hope this helps,
Jackie
Hi Robyn,
It seems like the culture you have created is akin to an Italian type "Biga Naturale". These will be started off with a very small amount of yeast, but then, if used regularly, will not be innoculated with further yeast.
Jackie's comments below explain clearly about the numerous wild yeasts as opposed to the one strain, saccharomyces cerevisiae, in commercial yeast. As your feeding regime without the yeast continues, the dominant active yeasts become the wild ones, not the commercial one. Reason being that the commercial one doesn't like the acidic environment, whereas some of the wild yeasts do.
I know you reference the atmosphere in connection with using rye flour, but I think the main source of yeast will be in the flour itself, and also on your hands, if you choose to mix by hand.
Eric is right that this is not technically a "sourdough starter"; that can only be achieved by allowing the natural yeasts present in a mix of flour and water to begin fermenting naturally. Ok, so there may be other ingredients used like pineapple juice, yoghurt, raisins etc, but definitely no added commercial yeast.
That said, once you stop adding commercial yeast, your culture will mutate fairly rapidly, and leave you with a culture which does indeed perform like a true sourdough culture would.
I hope you don't mind me jumping in half way through this thread. I have read the posts below, and it is good to see some posts from Daisy_A pointing to all the wonderful resources available right here at TFL.
I wish you every success with your culture, and fervently hope you will be able to maintain its feeding regime successfully without having to add any commercial yeast. And no doubt we all hope to see you post on the lovely bread made with said culture
Best wishes
Andy
To Jackie, Andy, and Daisy - Thank you all very much for your comments. One of these days I will try S. John Ross' method of flour-and-water starter birthing, but as a complete beginner to the world of sourdough creation, I wasn't confident enough to use that method first.
Having said that, I do not add any yeast to my "culture" at all; that was just for the initial mix. I got a 1/2 gal. kitchen jar from Walmart for $7, leave the lid off, and only cover the jar with a very clean dishtowel, and not the terry type, either but a smooth cotton one. I live at 5500' with aspens and pines, and there's something about the environment that my culture loves. A daily feeding of whole wheat flour and water, a few hours' sit on the windowsill (warm out but not that warm, so the sun through the window is really delicious), and my new batch of starter is getting along merrily. By Monday it should be ready for rye flour feedings, which is what I used before with such grand success. This time it's got a mellower scent to it, but I think time will change that, especially over the next week.
Anyway, the entire argument over when starter is starter and when it is not starter is rather silly, and I shouldn't have been so sensitive, nor should I have taken offense. I understand a purist's POV, but I am not a purist, just a beginner trying to find a good sour note to my breads. I choose to call my starter, starter, because it is just that. I'm guessing that when I use just flour and water, I'll still end up with a lovely sour starter, because in the end it isn't what one begins with, but what one maintains with. And isn't that the main thing?
I do appreciate the encouragement and if I ever get that fruity smell again, I won't be so quick to dump the starter, but see if I can bring it back around. And when I get a loaf that's as pretty as the other ones I've seen posted, then I'll proudly display it here!
Robyn
PS to Daisy; since my house isn't that warm, my starter doesn't bubble up so much, so I can't do a health check based on looks alone. I pay attention that I have bubble action, and after that I have to go by how the stuff smells. As long as it smells nice and sour, I know it's doing alright! I'm glad that everyone who talks about starter posted photos, as it makes it much easier to compare mine to theirs. Right now my house maintains about a 62* average, which is rather cool for starter, but then, so is San Francisco... huh, something to ponder...