NMNF Woes - Refrigerator elves?
I have no idea what happened....maybe there are elves in my fridge messing with my starters.
I currently have 3 different NMNF starters in my fridge, one because I "lost" it, (it was buried in the back of the bottom shelf behind some really nasty pickled beets that my DH won't let me throw out) and in my frenzy I just made a new one and a third because the "new" one seemed to loose it's Umph so I started another. #3 has been doing great, but again yesterday I went to build a levain and I got a few little bubbles with the first feed, but absolutely no action at all with number 2. So I fed it Whole grain Rye for #3 thinking it would love that, and still no action. In desperation I put 15 grams of #2 in the mixture and put it back in the warm breeding spot. <sigh>
Something is wrong, and now that report cards, parent teacher interviews, and school musical are finished I want to fix this! So here are the questions:
- how do I revive a "dead" NMNF starter? (or should I just start over)
-my fridge tends to run cold, could this be the problem?
-or are there elves
Elves definitely are the problem ;)
Are you leaving your starter out at room temp?
If your starter is stuck, try some pineapple juice.
Three factors will fix almost every starter problem: pineapple juice, warm room temp, and time. (I'm overgeneralizing a bit...)
Good luck!
Can't use pineapple - family allergies. It is pretty cool here, so I put the levain in the oven with the light on. It eventually came back to life, but it's pretty sluggish. I gave it some lovely home milled rye flour - hoping that helps.
Are you sure that #1 is bad? I have kept starter in the fridge for many weeks without problems.
I would try reviving #1 by feeding in the usual way for a couple of days.
It was lost in the fridge for months...gave it a good feed and hoping it comes back to life!
Life got away with me and I left my regular starter in the fridge for 7 months and it came roaring back great in about 3 days. They're resilient critters.
-Jay
neglected starter is patience and try not to discard in the first three days. Start small with a 1:1:1 feeding for example and give it 24 hours at least before adding more flour & water. Wait for aromas and activity before a second feeding. And above 75°F
Pesky elves were making hooch I'll bet. And they love pickled beets too!
Thanks Mini. I'm digging out the heating pad (it's *never* that warm in my house)
My NMNF starter is like me nearing 68 I'm slow, really slow. lethargic - nearly catatonic. After months in the fridge it is acidic, sour, nearly dead, very cold, slow lethargic and catatonic. When this happens take 20 g and add 60 g each of rye and and water, get it to 78 F and stir it every 6 hours. It may take 24 hours for it to double but when it does you can thicken it back up to 66% hydration let it rise 25% and back in the fridge it can go for another 6 months:-) This just happened to me and my SIL. Both were fixed within 30 hours no worries!
Happy NMNF baking
I find that as a near retirement (Next week! yay!) I'm slowing down, maybe my starter caught my lethargy too. I have fed, and will sit it on the heating pad. Hopefully I'll remember to give it a stir every 6 hours or so. It will have to sit by it's lonesome overnight.
and was cleaning out the fridge a few days back. Got all the starters in various shades of gray, cleaned up and fed proper to get them active. Didn't plan on an extra day or so and scheduling got way off track. Now they all kicked in and I've had to slow them down until I've got time to bake. I did ditch a few and restarted the yeast water starter as it was the worst of the bunch. I could tell which starter was started from sauerkraut from the lack of ammonia aromas, the quick come back and the persistent sourkraut aroma hanging in the air. ( Me and my nose being the only one sensing it.) Anyway, new yeast water starter w/ AP wheat doubled overnight and getting fed now. Think that will be the first loaf. The chilled Rye is also begging for work. ...and painters just arrived! If they start in the kitchen...
Painters sounds like a luxury! (I'm the painter in our house) hoping for your sake they don't start in the kitchen. I have to get better about labeling my starters, I kind of look at them and think hmmm I think that was the one I started from that apple from Pat's tree? Sauerkraut sounds like an interesting one, I bet that would be great in a nice hearty rye bread....I got up this morning and my starter that was recovering on the heating pad overnight had gone crazy, so I guess it was fine...just too cold in my house. Happy retirement!
impossible to kill if you don't bake them or ,over salt them, it seems:-) You will retirement! The worst day of retirement is better than the best day of working by a factor of 10! The key to a happy retirement is to do what you love rather than loving what you are doing. Retirement is pure bliss for me because I always do what I love .....and what I love the most is doing absolutely nothing! I'm never ever disappointed:-)
Happy Baking
Great advice. I'm looking forward to doing things on my own schedule. Using the bathroom whenever I want being high on the list. Long walks with my dog, being able to actually *watch* the bread instead of throwing it in the fridge and hoping for the best, the list continues...I'll figure it out. Thanks for the advice!
retired for going on 17 years. A good day fishing... And I don't even fish! Rearranging my sock drawer is something that is within my realm of doing. That is, if I'm not busy doing nothing that hour.
dabrownman is right though. He is close to the laziest person on the planet. He post things that his (recently promoted) first class apprentice does, but takes all the credit. Lucy is the brains of the operation anyway. Shame on him.
Truth is that I liked my job, but never loved it. So when I was let go, back in early 2003, just about the only thing that I missed was the camaraderie of my work-mates. After that, not much. I recall that I never woke up thinking that I'd rather be at work than at home.
be somewhere else it is best to just go there and see if you were right ! I really need to spray the weeds in the front yard desert rocks between the cacti and succulents and it has been like that for some time now. If I let them go a little longer I can get one of those Brush Hogs you see on TV that cut down small tress an inch thick. Sadly, the president of HOA lives across the street and he really thinks that the look of weeds in my rocks affects his property value. Silly man.... who just retired, is bored stiff and is always looking for yard stuff for me to do - like I need stuff to do. I hear that the weed killing spray stuff causes cancer so the brush hog might be a better idea :-) Or I can wait for the wind to blow his direction, stand up wind, and wildly, spray away.....decisions...... decisions.
Tell your neighbour that the "spray" is illegal in Canada, (your Canadian friend here can vouch for that) and that you are trying to achieve a more natural landscape that is better for the environment. We gave up on weeds, and are embracing the "meadow" look in our lawn. Hey it's green! So what if it is 90% plants that others might classify as weeds. Those clovers and buttercups have flowers too.
hmmm, mine is kinda messy. I suppose I could put "match socks" on my short list of things to do.
Honestly, until last year, I really did love my job. They say you will know when it is time to retire, and it was absolutely true. I started to get to the point where everything was annoying me, and I was getting grumpy. I certainly don't want to be that person, thus time to throw in the towel.
Re: starter woes.
using part of my IT experience, I made frozen backups of my starter. Until I learned the hard way that frozen starter dies off after 4 to 6 months.
at least now I can compare three starters:
1. Cultures For Health: Whole Wheat/Desem sourdough. This was/is my favorite of the three, in terms of flavor profile.
2. Cultures For Health: San Francisco style sourdough. This is what I'm using now, about 5 weeks. Probably not fully matured yet.
3. Carl's 1847 Oregon Trail starter. This was the most robust, quickest to refresh, most active in the fridge, most powerful of the three. Hoo-boy! You can't stop this. But I didn't like it for two reasons: a) the way it smelled, b) I couldn't get a decent "tang" flavor out of it. Though I admit, the latter could have been more due to my procedures not favoring the acetic-forming bacteria. I still need to do more reading on that.
Every few weeks or months, cleave off some of the newly refreshed levain, wrap it up and drop it in the freezer & dump the frozen levain - once you're sure the refresh is active and healthy.
2nd backup is to spread the levain out on parchment, very thin, let it dry and then peel it off, crackle it up and drop it into a lidded jar. It has an infinitely longer life span than frozen levain.
I actually travelled with "crackled" levain one time because I wanted to make bread while I was at my daughter's house. The dry on parchment method worked great and the starter came back to life in about 24 hours.