Very sour, expensive sourdough, causes a sensation of vomitting

I don't like my sourdough sour either, so I add a tsp. of baking soda to the mix.  The reason I make sourdough bread is for the health benefit, as even white sourdough does not spike blood sugar the way a regular bread does.  If it tasted very sour and made me sick, I wouldn't bother with it; I'd make regular bread with added oatmeal.

Lot of people like Wonder Bread judging from the amount shelf space it has in grocery stores but I don't so I don't buy it.  In your case you don't like sourdough so I would not make it.  Lots of variety in the world so choose what suits you.

Gerhard

NewbieBaker22,

Perhaps you should try a known good recipe from this, or another site, rather than fiddling around with something that doesn't seem to be working for you. Also, I'd like to know where you got your starter and how you're maintaining it, as well as the details of how you're making bread. There are lots of ways to influence the sourness of the final bread, either up or down. But, if you're not getting a good rise, we should work on that first. Most of the things that influence a good rise, also affect the taste and texture. As for throwing away starter, there are several ways to maintain a starter that do not include throwing any way. Give us as many details as you can, and we will help point you in the right direction to get the bread you want. My family doesn't like sour bread, so I make mine very mild, and they love it. It can be done, even with "sourdough" bread.

I have found, and heard, that a less fluid dough will give a culture with less lactic acid, which gives a bad flavor. So a cold-stored, non-pourable starter works the best.

How is the smell of the starter? It should be pleasantly "fruity", and not sharp, vinegary, yoghurt-ish, or overly yeasty.

On the other hand, too much acetic acid can also give a bad culture.

You might also be provoking acid production by doing a warm rise in the oven. I have no foundation for this suggestion from breadbaking, only from yoghurt making.

NewbieBaker22,

Try changing your starter maintenance to the following:

Use refined (white) flour for the feedings. The whole wheat flour is going to cause your bread to be very sour.

Feed more often, or put it in the fridge so it doesn't ferment as quickly. I use white flour, and at room temperature, I'd have to feed it twice a day. In the fridge, it only gets fed when I bake, which is about once or twice a week at the most, sometimes longer than a week between. With whole wheat flour, I'd have to feed more often.

Keep a smaller amount and build up when you bake. For instance, if you wanted to use 100g for baking bread, keep a smaller amount in the fridge, maybe 30g. Before your next bake, take the 30g out, feed it 50g each of flour and water, for a total of 130g. Let it ferment until it has risen to its highest size, then remove the 30g and put it back into the fridge for next time. Use the 100g for your bread. Now, you've fed your starter, but you've thrown nothing away, and you're ready to make bread.

I'm not so sure about adding flour after the fermentation time is complete. I'd think that would make your problem of not rising enough even worse. If you do want to bake with whole wheat and you don't want to use white flour even in your starter, you need to use a lower inoculation when you feed it. Even with white flour, if you're only taking out 50% of the starter, by volume, and replacing it with fresh flour and water, you are keeping way too much of the old starter. The more starter you have kept, the more food it needs to be fed. The less food it is fed, the more often it needs to be fed. If you don't feed it much, and you don't feed it often, you are over fermenting it, and that may be exactly why it doesn't rise well AND why it's too sour! If you have the time to watch it, the best way to feed it the optimum amount is to let it rise until it doesn't rise any more, then feed it. With the way you are feeding it, I would think it would reach that point every couple hours.

At the point you are right now, you seem to have way too much on your hands. Try using the majority of it in pancakes or something, and start over with just a small amount of it, like around 10g. To the 10g, add 30g each of flour and water, keep it at room temp, and watch it grow (just check on it every hour or so). When it reaches its highest point (peak), take note of how long it took to get there. That is the time you need to feed it again. If you want that time to be longer, feed it more flour and water compared to the amount of starter you keep. So, maybe 10g starter, but 35g or 40g each of flour and water next time. Or, calculate it out to the amount you want to use in your bread, plus a little more to carry on with. Just make sure the ratio of starter:flour:water is such that it stays well fed.

Does the recipe you're using presume no salt in the dough? I'm asking because salt does a lot of things to the dough besides just add a salty flavor. If the recipe was meant to have salt in it, it most likely won't work right without it. However, there are salt-free bread recipes around.

How long have you had your starter going? It may not be mature enough to be used in bread yet. Also, the methods used for "starting" the culture are not going to work for maintaining it. When you are trying to cultivate it at the beginning, there is a very small amount of the yeasts and LABs present on the flour. You want to keep as much of the same around as you can, so their numbers can multiply. As they multiply, they eat more of the food in less time, because there are "more mouths to feed" basically. At some point, the amount of new food being added has to be more than the amount of old starter being kept. The minimum ratio I've seen on here from most people is 1:1:1 of starter:flour:water by weight (or occasionally, maybe less water, but never less flour). I've found that my starter, when kept at room temp, needs much more food, around 1:2:2 in winter, up to as much as 1:8:8 in summer - twice a day!

as well.  If you don't like the taste of sourdough that you are making, why keep making it?  That would be my first questions, however it is not me to judge what you do... instead, I think the good people here have given you some great suggestions on what you can do to improve the taste.   FWIW:  I do not make sourdough, although I use a wild yeast starter and follow the instructions for Tartine bread explicitly.  We've never created a sourdough bread here and don't want to.  It's probably a bit more trickier than the sweet wild yeast breads I've been using.  Good luck!

Your bread needs salt.

Wait, so you took the discard from when you were creating your new starter and used that to make bread?

I'm also new to sourdough so I could be mistaken, but if I recall correctly the discard from an immature starter is not recommended to make bread with! That stuff could be leuconostoc for all you know - yum! (not!)

Another thing - is your 12-18 hour ferment in the fridge? The only stage when I ferment for that long at room temperature is when I'm building my levain. If I ever leave my final dough for 12-18 hours it's definitely going to be in the fridge, and only if I wanted it to be MORE sour. In my humble and none too experienced opinion I think you might have starter issues rather than baking method, though.

Lots of helpful information here in this thread.

NewbieBaker22,

You can get fine artisan bread using commercial yeast. On this site, there is all the help you need. Sourdough is stickier than dough made with commercial yeast. And it is somewhat difficult to work with also. But it isn't so bad once you get used to it, and the extra depth of flavor (without any sourness, even) is well worth it to some of us. But, that doesn't mean that you've failed or wasted anyone's time. A lot of what makes bread good has to do with how things are done, not what kind of yeast is involved. You can get a rich flavor in your bread without sourdough, once you learn how. Try looking at Pain à l'Ancienne:

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/33568/reinharts-pain-%C3%A0-lancienne

going off.  Try this before you ditch it.  Take half a cup of the stuff, as is, and let it just sit in the corner of the kitchen covered for a week until it goes thru a dead phase and then comes back to life.  Don't discard and don't feed.  

I suspect it hasn't completed it's intended journey into a viable sourdough starter and stuck in phase 3 not reaching phase 4.  Too much food, foo often, not enough acid.  You are inadvertently feeding the bugs that should have died out as more acid loving bugs move in to take over the starter.  

Clues:  "doesn't rise much"  "sticky"  "smells of vomit" "makes me vomit"  theses are all saying loudly that the culture is not completed the phase to high acid loving yeast.  Constant daily feeding keeps the culture too neutral.  You can speed up a healthy reaction by adding a teaspoon of lemon juice (citric acid) to the culture hopefully making the environment a little less friendly for these transient bacteria which seem to be eating up the food and preventing a positive change in the starter culture.  You can easily do this with little effort while you try other solutions.  

It may take a week or more so anything more than a daily observance is not needed.  Do mark the current level of starter and you may want to stir it once a day, giving you the chance to note any changes in aroma.  Do leave a good amount of head space in the jar or set it inside another bowl or container to catch any overflow when it does decide to produce the proper acid loving yeast.   When it does smell strong of beer, then remove a small portion and feed 1:2:2 by weight.

after all with a screen name like that, her advice cannot be all bad :-)

My first attempts at making sourdough were disastrous! I followed the recipes for starters in bread books that relied on commercial yeast and only a few days of starter maturity. The results were always the same: Dense bricks, hard as a rock and as sour as a lemon, that, as you noticed, caused a great deal of nausea.

In January, I borrowed Peter Reinhart's book, The Bread Baker's Apprentice. I followed his method to make the starter and the recipe for the bread. It was and is amazing! It was light and airy, lightly tangy and no nausea!

My starter has continued to mature and the complexity of the flavors is increasing and improving. Around the same time, I bought a pound of commercial yeast. I used it twice in January and have not touched it since!

Hi.  Unfortunately, from the beginning, it appears you may have taken more steps back than steps forward.  But, you HAVE learned  a lot of basic sourdough techniques. By following Mini's and others' suggestions, you'll soon (eventually) be taking a lot more steps forward than steps back.  

When I began baking with sourdough, I had starter issues that have mostly been resolved.  I followed the suggestions and advice from the experienced bakers here, and my bread is much better now.   

A suggestion:  Don't give up on your starter.  While you go through the process of modifying it, you can still bake with bakers yeast.

She really knows everything starter and bread. And learning from a good bread baking book, like Peter Reinhart's (where I learned from) is definitely a better way for a beginner than following some Youtube recipes.

When you have an established, properly working starter (what yours obviously isn't, yet), you can use it in any way you want, even make sweet pastry with it, without it tasting the slightest bit acidic.
Karin

Your comment seems to indicate that you don't know much about what sourdoughs should taste like. Might I suggest trying to find a good local bakery that sells a homemade sourdough loaf? Or perhaps a friend, coworker, neighbor, etc. who makes his/her own loaves and try the finished product? My guess is that when you taste these other loaves you will find them to be tasty and without the nasty side effects of your loaves. There is always the (very small) chance, however, that you are just not a sourdough person and you find them equally off-putting. Either way, you will be able to determine if this is just a problem between you and sourdough or you and your starter specifically. 

I'd put money on the latter :) My suspicion is that you'll find what most of us here have found: that the tangy taste of sourdough is worth the effort of solving the starter problems that we all encounter as newbies (I am currently trying to work my fifth or sixth starter into the usable stage - after many newbie misfires myself). Once you get past the initial tough part of finding the right routine for your starter, it's no harder or more costly than most other "artisan" baking methods. 

The whole process of making sourdough [...] is very expensive compared to making a normal dough from commercial yeast.

It need not be. I keep a very small amount of starter and never ever throw anything away.

Below you'll see a link to a comment I posted a while ago that contains a photo of the mother leaven I keep. You will see that it is quite small indeed. It is fed only twice a week, always with the same flours & at the same hydration. Absolutely no waste whatsoever.
http://bit.ly/1ctKjdC

As for your loaves being too sour, I've been working on that myself. I found master baker Dave Miller's method for obtaining a sweeter dough (as described by Farine) quite interesting.
http://bit.ly/1fmHCWe

Use of preferment is quite helpful to alleviate sourness in sourdough. There are a few very interesting entries here at The Fresh Loaf on that topic.

As many here have said, don't give up. The mistakes are part of the learning process for sure. Happy baking!

Wow...really unfortunate to hear someone go through so much trouble and disappointment with sourdough, and it seems baking bread in general.  I get the absolute opposite from sourdough bread baking. Nothing but enjoyment and satisfaction. 

The key thing to keep in perspective here is the screen name 'Newbiebaker22.'  Hell, weren't we all at one point in our bread baking beginnings frustrated with a thing or two, maybe even wanting to pack it all in?  I know I was extremely frustrated when I went through maybe 4 or 5 starter attempts.  When they kept dying on me, MiniOven helped me out and with some persistence, I have that same starter alive and strong over a year later.  Of course, I don't have the stomach issues as mentioned above, so there may not be a solution to the problem...

A shame.

John

if I took my starter and added enough flour and water to it to make a loaf and left in on the counter for 12-14 hours and then shaped it and let it rise a couple of hours more (assuming it could do that) my bread would be very sour since it is basically a starter by then but it would also be a brick since it would've likely collapsed before it ever got into hot oven.

Let's see your exact recipe so we can figure this out - something is not adding up.  Is your tarter at least 2 weeks old and stable?