For the last several weeks I have been working on starting a sourdough starter. I say working on starting a starter because, well, quite frankly, it hasn't gone as planned. I have had a love of baking bread for a long time and I figured that this was the next natural step for me to take in order to take my bread baking to next the level. For the last several years I have been using Rose Levy Beranbaum's book The Bread Bible as my go to guide for baking bread. When I came across a post on Serious Eats from Donna Currie of Cookistry about making a sourdough starter I decided that now was the time to try this.
I decided to go reread what Rose had said about sourdough starters in the bread bible. I had remembered from reading the entire book back when I first got it that Rose had included a section on sourdough bread so I wanted to reread this first before I went ahead and started on my starter. Rose included step by step instructions in The Bread Bible on exactly what to do to make and have a successful sourdough starter. Rose and Donna had different suggestions on how to create a starter. It's not that one of them is right and one of them is wrong, they each just decided to take a different route to get to the same end destination. I decided that I wanted to follow Rose's suggestions as I figured I would probably end up making her recipes in The Bread Bible with the starter so I figured it made more sense to just follow her instructions.
After reading the instructions I knew I needed to go to the Whole Foods to get the Organic Rye flour that was called for on Day 1. Yes, day 1. You see, creating a sourdough starter is not a fast process. While the actual work involved is very easy, tt can take weeks to get a starter that is ready to actually make bread. After a successful trip to Whole Foods I started my starter. I mixed the 120 grams of rye flour with 120 grams of bottled water and left it sit until day 3 out on the kitchen table. When day 3 came around Rose says in the bible that the starter should look like a really thick pancake batter. When I noticed that mine looked this way as well I got very excited. I was actually using wild yeast to create a starter that could be used to make bread.
I followed the instructions for feeding the starter on days 3 and 4 and the starter seemed to be be doing just fine. On day 5 though, I hit a small bump in the road. On day 5 Rose says that the starter should have risen to between 3 and 4 cups in volume. When mine was still sitting on the bottom of the mason jar I had used to hold the starter I was pretty disappointed. I had I messed up my starter? No fear, Rose added a paragraph to the instructions for day 5 talking about just this very problem. Since you are using wild yeasts to create your starter the amount of time it takes for the starter to reach enough activity to rise to 3 or 4 cups can very. Rose says to just keep up with the daily feedings on the starter until it reaches the point of being active. Phew, crisis averted. I did the daily feeding for day 5 and waited until day 6 hoping that the starter would finally be fully active. No such luck, I continued with the daily feedings for several more days. I actually lost track but somewhere around day 14 disaster struck.
On day 14 I noticed that there was a small amount of mold growing on the starter. WTF. I was devastated. To this day I'm still not sure what exactly went wrong. From about day 4 onward there were always lost of bubbles on top of the starter indicating to me that the starter was active just not active enough to actually rise the starter. My best guess is that this activity was not enough to lower the ph of the starter and it never became acidic enough to kill off the mold. I also noticed that the starter had started to smell like acetone as well.
Not sure what to do I went to the forums on Rose's website for help. I only manged to get a couple of responses but one of them suggested added organic grapes to my starter to help jump start the yeast. I had not heard of this before so I went to the internet to search for other suggestions. Sure enough, I actually found quite a few other sites that also had this suggestion as well as several others. One site I found suggested using milk instead of the water in the starter but they made an effort to clearly warn you that the milk had to be a room temperature or it would not work. Thinking about this, I wondered if my starter had failed because I had been using bottled water directly out of the fridge. Curious to see if this was the problem I decided to try the starter again only this time using room temperature water.
Wow, this was a worse disaster then the first starter. This time I had a small amount of mold on the starter on day 3. Devastated again, I threw out the starter and decided to try the grapes suggestion. I'm still not sure what happened with my brain but for some reason when I read to try organic grapes I interpreted that as using organic grape juice. I went to the store and bought organic grape juice and tried making a new starter. This was the worse trial yet. The top of the starter was completely covered in mold on day 2. Organic grape juice is clearly not the way to go.
I am determined to get this starter to work. I am wondering if maybe there is a problem with my mason jar that I am holding the starter in. For the next trial I am going to try sterilizing jar much like you would for canning. That should kill anything that is left around after being washed in the dishwasher. I'm also unsure of what to put into the starter. My thought is to try making the starter just as Rose has outline in the bible, since that is the way I got the best results so far. I am also thinking that maybe I should switch to using organic bread flour for the daily feedings.
Sunday, June 12, 2011
Good Morning
Not quite sure what this blog is going to end up being but I have a few things sort of bouncing around in my head that I want to put to paper and write down. I'm hoping that this blog can become a fun way for me to write down these ideas as well as any other random things that I'm sure I'll want to write about in the future.
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