Starter Troubleshooting - please help!
Hi all.
The past week I have been neck deep in everything sourdough starter, but there are just so many different variables and pieces of advice, it’s hard to know what to try and what not to do. My starter has consistently had bubbles, mostly on the top (some very large ones, some small), and a few tiny ones visible from the sides of the jar. It smells like sourdough bread, the pleasant smell has stuck for a couple days now, but it does not rise at all. After reading several forum topics on here, I’m under the impression that NOT feeding it for the next at least 24 hours might be the move, but I don’t want to starve it if that’s incorrect! Please advise!
Here’s a little recap on what my starter has been doing/has been through:
Using organic unbleached AP flour.
Day 1: 1 cup AP, 1 cup water from a filtered system.
Day 2: Rose 1/2 inch and fell overnight. Discarded half and fed same 1:1:1 ratio with filtered water and AP flour.
Day 3: Rose an inch in first 12 hours and went onto double or 2.5 in size overnight. Discarded half and fed same 1:1:1 ratio with filtered water and AP flour. A little smelly.
Day 4: Nearly tripled or quadrupled, overflowing jar and falling back down overnight. Discarded half and fed same 1:1:1 ratio with filtered water and AP flour. TERRIBLE rotten smell.
No rise after feed and a ton of water or liquid on top. However, smell was starting to change to less deplorable. I got worried thinking it was underfed and discarded half and fed normal 1:1:1 again. Also noticed my kitchen had been around 72-74*F, so I kept in the oven with the light on. It was pulling around 79-82*F in there.
Day 5: No rise/fall at all. Smell now more sour and like bread. Thinking I’m on the right track, I decide to start 2 feeds per day, same discard half and 1:1:1 feed ratios. Same environment. No rise between feeds, just lots of bubbles on top!
Day 6 (today 8/20): No rise/fall at all. Pleasant traditional sourdough smell. Still thick consistency, discarded half and fed 1:1:1 ratio, but boiled my own water and let it cool for the water portion after reading another thread on here and thinking it was my water. Same environment.
I also wanted to experiment from a post I saw on another site and put took some of the discard and put it in another jar for a 2:1:1 feed. Also used the boiled and cooled water here. Same environment.
Here we are 5 hours later and there is no rise on either, but both do have numerous bubbles on top as normal. The “original” starter that had the 1:1:1 feed admittedly has more bigger and a few more bubbles than the one I experimented with with a 2:1:1 ratio.
In conclusion, my thoughts now are to wait and see on both and not to feed at the 12 hour mark tonight. It seems some people have had success in doing this as they might have been diluting their starter by feeding too much during the quiet period. Which I thought was when you were supposed to feed more — the more you know!! I plan to not feed, but please please give me all the advice you have and your thoughts!
Thanks in advance!
It sounds like your starter-to-be is developing normally. It will probably burst to life in another day or two.
There have been a number of recent threads on TFL asking for help with starters. I'm not sure why that is.
Here is what has been going on during the last six days. Your not-yet-starter started out with a crop of little organisms that came in with the flour. Some of them grew well in the initial mixture. They gave you some bubbles. Other microbes started to lower the pH - increase the acidity - and it became too acidic for those initial organism and they stopped flourishing. Others did better in the more acidic environment and may have helped the pH drop further.
Over the days the increasing pH favored one organism after another. Some bubbled, some smelled bad, some did nothing visible. The dormant yeast was waiting for the pH to get low enough (probably 3.9 or 4.0, I gather) to wake up.
If you were unlucky the pH would get stuck before that happened but for most people the process continues. What happens when you feed the thing? If most of the flour had not been used up by those other organisms, then you would just be diluting the concentration of the acid-producers and that would slow things down, especially if you discarded part of the starter. So no feeding the first few days.
Stirring once or twice a day is helpful. That tends to cause activity to perk right up. Feeding is better done after those initial days when more of the flour will have been metabolized. The mixture may have gotten thin, indicating the the protein has been degraded. that would be a good time to add more flour and water.
You don't want to feed too much so you don't dilute the acid-forming organisms, but there is nothing at all critical about the exact amounts or exactly when. If you read more about troubleshooting a starter you will see all kinds of suggestions for refresh ratios, temperatures, time between feeding, etc. People can suggest all these different numbers because almost any of them will do the job. Stick with the program, don't worry that you haven't done everything exactly some particular way. It will work.
If you ever want to build another starter, begin with pineapple juice or some other acidic fruit juice instead of water. That will help bypass those early days of bubbles and smells, and speed up the whole process.
TomP
To much water. If you want a 50/50 mix - you need to reduce the water by half - water is twice as heavy as the flour (or there about). Try that. And i forgot - follow whatever you like - as long as you wait - (always the tough part) - you'll have a starter. Enjoy!
Davey1 is correct: 1:1:1 is by weight not volume. So if you don't want to get a scale, you gotta put 1/2 as much water in as flour.
Also, using a cup of flour every day, you're gonna use a lot of flour over the weeks it takes your starter to start & get consistent. so maybe think about using a smaller amount.
It took me 3 weeks for my starter to be usable and 6 months for it to get consistent. You might be better than me -- I made a lot of mistakes &, like you, stuck with volume measurements at the time -- but If I used a cup a day, I would have burned through 180 cups -- or about 21 kg of flour -- just to get to the point of having a reasonably consistent starter.
Enjoy the process. Have patience. The vomit & acetone smells are normal. Starters go through stages. Keep on going.
Rob
Thank you all so much for your advice. Still waiting! Yesterday I skipped the 2nd feed in the evening and just stirred. When I woke up, nothing new, but the bubbles were more uniform in size and the consistency was thinner. I discarded to a smaller amount of starter and fed again using the scale this time to feed same amount of water and flour, but also switched to unbleached bread flour instead of the unbleached AP flour. It’s only been about an hour and nothing yet. I do see some bubbles on the sides so hoping it’s doing something. If not, I shall continue to just be patient. Will update later on!
Patience truly is a virtue - especially when making a starter. When it's watery - add more - emphasis on watery - to thicken up again. It'll be a starter in a few weeks. Enjoy!