December 14, 2009 - 7:45pm
Sourdough Rising Problems
So my sourdough starter is bubbly and seems to look fine. I'm almost sure it hasn't risen after about 9 days. How do I get it to rise?
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So my sourdough starter is bubbly and seems to look fine. I'm almost sure it hasn't risen after about 9 days. How do I get it to rise?
1. How old is your starter?
2. How often do you feed it?
3. What's the hydration level?
4. What recipe are you trying to use?
5. what's the temperature in your kitchen?
1. 2 weeks, but I put it in the fidge once
2. Once every 24 hours
3. I keep it at 100% (1:1:1)
4. One I found online. It uses plain flour and water
5. I think 69F.
Is your starter doubling between feedings?
So far it sounds like your starter is too young and it's underfed.
At this point, you should be leaving your starter out on the counter and feeding it twice daily to strengthen it. It takes a few weeks until the starter is well-established so it can raise bread.
In the meantime, you can try something easier like pancakes or waffles. When your starter is reliably doubling in 8 hours you can try baking bread and start storing the starter in the fridge.
If your starter isn't at least doubling in 12 or even 8 hours, it isn't ready to bake with. Even after it is doubling in 8 hours, if you are looking at directions that say it should rise in 1 hour, that's not a sourdough recipe.
If your starter is healthy, the time it will take to rise bread is dependent on 1.)The amount of starter you use in the dough mix, 2.) The temperature of the dough and the hydration of the dough.
As an example. My daily sourdough bread is a very simple straight forward mix that starts with 50 grams of starter which is about 1 heaping Tablespoon. To this I add 325 grams of water at a temp that will give me a dough temp of 73F and 500 grams of bread flour and 10 grams of salt. After mixing well I cover the dough and leave it on the counter or someplace where it will be in 65-75 degree temps. The next morning the dough will be fluffy and get some stretch and folds. After about 18 hours from when I first mixed the starter and water and flour, it will be ready for shaping.
If I start the process using 200 grams of starter, the inoculation will be larger, the colony of bacteria will multiply faster and I'll be ready to bake a less tasty but still good loaf in about 8 hours.
In warm summer Months when the kitchen is 10 degrees warmer everything is accelerated somewhat.
So, first feed your starter at room temp until it's healthy and smells good.
Eric
The nice thing about sourdough is that there's only one possible cure: refreshments,
Mine was weak, so I fed it tripling (using the same weight of starter, water and flour) every 4-6 hours (depending on the amount of time it took to double) for 3-4 days.
I started with 10 grams + 10 grams + 10 grams and continued
with 20+20+20, 30+30+30 and so on.
The remains I collected in a jar in the fridge, stirring the content every time.
At the end of the third day the sourdough was so active that it kept growing and overflowing the jar both inside and outside the fridge