May 16, 2010 - 7:48am
First Attempt at Sourdough Starters/Seed Culture
This is my first attempt at trying to create a starter and I think that mine is dead before it ever lived.
I am using the guidelines in Peter Reinhart's Artisan Breads Every Day. I am coming up on five days (started it Wednesday afternoon, it is now Sunday morning), and have nothing but a paste-like glue. When I added new flour and water on Friday afternoon there were a few small bubbles and now I have just aerated it again and there is no sign of activity.
It is currently about 68 in my house and I used rye flour and water. Do I just keep waiting or should I start again using pineapple juice?
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What's your feeding process like?
Day 1 (Wed) was 1 oz of rye flour and 2 oz of water. I aerated it three times a day until Day 3 (Fri) when I added 1 oz of rye and 1 oz of water again.
....this may be the mother of all "start a starter" web sites. There are several threads and discussions here, but this is a good one.....
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/233
There are other posts by Debra Wink that also explain the technical reasons for the pineapple juice and whole wheat or rye start technique, but most discussions follow along this theme. It works almost every time its tried.
If you have the juice and fresh whole wheat or rye flour, keep feeding the one you have AND start a new one. We are talking table spoons (better still....grams) to start with and feeding will take a max of 5 minutes twice a day.
On the other hand, if you don't care about the novelty of starting your own starter, there are free and commercial sources from which you can order dried starters, and within a week you can have a healthy, proven, vibrant starter that will last and be useable for as long as you take care of it.
Keep on just as the instructions say, but keep it in a warmer place. When kept at 68° it will really slow things down. It is good to use at least part rye flour until it wakes up. Most starters take more like 7 or 8 days to become active, so don't give up. It will work!! Did you not use pineapple juice in the beginning? You only mentioned using water. You could give it a juice dose now and it would still help. If you don't have pineapple juice, orange juice will also work.
No, I didn't use pineapple juice since I didn't have it and PR's guidelines just said water OR juice.
So, should I just add an oz. of juice to perk it up or wait until I am supposed to feed it again?
Add the juice now, if you can, and then again with tomorrow's feeding.
I started my starter almost 2 weeks ago so I can empathize with your frustration and perhaps impatience with "when the heck is this thing going to do anything?" ;)
That's at least how I felt.
Started my starter with OJ. However, my problem, like yours, was the temperature. I put mine in the oven, but I didn't keep mine at a consistent temp. So it was at 80 F for maybe 3 hours, and then it fell back to 65-68 F. Once I got this figured out, Sven (the starter) took off (around day 5).
I don't know if you'll find this relavent, but I found this while trying to find info on sourdough. It's a comparison of water/flour starter and the juice/flour starter. This is actually written by a member here at TFL (Paul). I can't remember is SN though. Sorry Paul!
http://yumarama.com/blog/968/starter-from-scratch-intro/
I'm not saying one is better, it's just a visual guide to illustrate the stages of each starters process.
As long as it helps, right?
Well, I started a second starter yesterday using the first link above (and bought some pineapple juice. I fed it today and there are a few bubbles in it tonight.
Since I started a new one, the first one got competitive and started bubbling today, so I added two oz of rye and one oz of juice, so hopefully, I will end up with two great starters and can share them around the neighbourhood.
Thanks for all the advice and if you can think of anything else, throw it out there.
Well, the first starter looks like it's ready to go. I will be making the first loaf from it this afternoon! Thanks for all the advice.
The second starter from Wild Yeast's blog link above should be ready on the weekend and I will try that out as well.