I am struggling with making sourdough bread. I have been working on a starter for over 2 weeks and it is very inconsistent. I started by mixing 50g wheat flour with 50g water on day 1. From day 2 until days until day 8, I took 40g from the starter and added 20g wheat flour and 20g of water. On day 5, it started to consistently double. I continued feeding the same feeding until days 8, the switched to 1:1:1 (20g starter, 20g wheat flour, 20g water). It continued to double each day. On day 8, I tried my first sourdough recipe and it worked great, but several attempts since then, the bread was flat, dense and doughy.
I am beginning to think it may be how I am using the starter? For instance: I feed my starter everyday around 7pm and let it go until the next day at 7pm. At this time do two batches:
1) I take 10g from the starter and add 50g whole wheat flour and 50g of water. I let this sit overnight, sometimes it doubles, sometimes not. I use this in a recipe around 10am-noon. 1st attempt worked well, subsequent ones not so well.
2) The second batch I make is feeding. So 20g starter with 20g wheat flour, 20g water. This one always doubles.
I have also tried a recipe on the King Arthur YouTube to make a loaf by taking 40g out of my starter, mixing it with all the ingredients, letting it hydrolize for 45 minutes doing folds at 15 min intervals. Then letting it sit overnight. The first time it worked well and the dough more than doubled and the bread came out good. The second time I tried it a few days later (with starter that had doubled overnight), no rising occurred after the overnight sitting.
I am really confused why I am having such inconsistent results. Please help!
Biggest problem - besides the instructions - is not waiting long enough. Give it time and it'll be better - a couple weeks is too short. Enjoy!
I don't know your room temperature, which could affect details of timing, but your feeding schedule is unusual and is going to increase the acidity of the starter to the point of potentially becoming unusable. In fact, I would reverse your two feedings so that you use the 1:1:1 batch for bread and the 1:5:5 one for maintaining the starter.
Feeding a starter will raise its pH (lower pH = more acidic), and as the fermentation proceeds its pH will start to decrease. If you only feed it using a small ratio (like 1:1:1), the feeding doesn't raise the pH by much (because you don't dilute the start very much), so the starter gets back down to a low pH state fairly quickly, and if it's too low, the yeast will become rather inactive. The acidity can also attack the protein, making the mixture thinner or even soupy much too soon.
The way you are doing it, aside from these matters of acidity, you need to wait longer. Here you take a thin, highly acidic, inactive starter and feed it. It usually takes several hours for the starter to wake up and become active again, and then several more hours for it to ferment all the new food and become maximally active and ready for use. You are using it too soon after feeding, and it's no surprise that sometimes the starter is in good enough condition to use for bread and sometimes it isn't.
Then you give your mother starter a small feed, so it always remains very acidic and gets into that over-acidified inactive state long before the next day when you will either refresh it or bake with it. I wouldn't be surprised if in the near future you will have a hard time making a decent loaf of bread at all, as the starter gets more acidic and less active, cycle after cycle.
Lately I have been refreshing my starter once a day, keeping it at room temperature (70 - 75 deg F). I feed it with bread flour at 1:6:7 (starter:water:flour) or thereabout around midnight. Using bread flour instead of all-purpose delays protein breakdown, and using a lower hydration (around 85 - 90%) slows down fermentation. This starter is usually ready to use around 10 - 11 AM, and remains usable for many hours. If I won't be using it until later in the afternoon, I may feed at 1:.25:.25 or somewhat higher depending on how much starter I will need) and it will be ready to use then.
I refresh my starter using 5g of old starter, 30g of water, and 35g, targeting 85 - 90% hydration (there is no reason to be very precise about it). If I know I will want to use more starter than that, either I just increase the starting amounts or I add more flour and water the next morning, probably another 20 - 30g of water and flour. With a small refresh ratio like that the starter will be ready to use in only a few more hours. I use most of the starter to bake with, and save at least enough to refresh and keep. That's not hard because 5g of old starter is about the dregs that remain after the rest is scooped out but not totally cleanly.
If you don't bake too often, you could start storing the starter in the refrigerator. You can use it as is for several days (some people manage as long as a week), then it will do better with a refresh cycle at room temperature before use.
Summary:
TomP