Sourdough starter a Flop

[Hollywood Chickens]

Quote:
I am making sourdough pizza for dinner also!

 

[BirdMom]

This is what I did a couple of years ago. I got an excellent starter out of it, and used it almost every day for about a year before getting too busy and putting it in the freezer. I think it's time to pull it out and get it going again.

Good luck with yours. There are a million ways to do it, but if you use a commercial yeast, you won't be culturing the sourdough yeast, you'll be growing more of the commercial yeast. I tried many different ways of doing it over the years, and this is the only one that was successful. Also, many recipes have you throw out a bunch of it as you're building it. If the volume gets too big, just use some of it in your regular pancake recipe or bread or something. I hate to waste food, and there's no reason to!

They do say that a bit of rye flour added into your first mixture helps, as does whole grain flour, but I was quite successful with plain old chlorinated tap water and all-purpose flour from the store. The starter got extremely active after a couple of weeks, and my bread could rise in just a couple of hours after shaping. I also used it in muffins, biscuits, cakes, cookies, anything breadlike!

Sourdough Starter

2 T. water (some people say non-chlorinated, I just used regular tap water, it’s fine.)
2 T. flour (use whatever flour you’re going to be using most with the sourdough)

Mix together well in a clean glass or plastic container. Some people claim that using metal utensils with sourdough will kill it, but I’ve always used metal spoons and forks with it and it is extremely active and healthy.

Cover loosely and place in a warm spot. On top of the refrigerator is a good place if the rest of your kitchen is cool. I kept mine near the stove, just not near enough to heat it and kill it. Do NOT store it on the stove, when you use the stove or oven it will overheat and kill it.

Every day, add 1 T. water and 1 T. flour. Mix in well, and pour into a new clean container. The container switching is very important to avoid mold contamination, which will grow on stuff splashed up the sides and left for a couple of days.

It may smell pretty nasty on some days, but just continue with the feeding and switching. After about 1 ½ weeks, it should begin bubbling and foaming after you feed it and leave it for a few hours, and it should have a fairly strong sour smell. At this point it’s ready to use. If it doesn’t start foaming and growing up the container, don’t despair, just continue feeding it every day and it’ll get there. It will usually have a liquid on the top after it sits for a little while, just stir that liquid back in.

Once it’s going well, you can put it in the fridge in a clean container and just leave it alone. Feed it every 3 weeks or so, using about half of it and adding back in ½ cup water and ½ cup flour, (that’s what I do, though some people use 1 cup water and 1 cup flour each time. If you want to have it ready to use at a moments notice, you might want to do the 1 cup thing so you’ve got enough, but I usually just grow some more in it overnight if I know I’m going to use it the next day.)

Good luck with it. I'll try to check back on this thread if you have any questions, or you can pm me. I love cooking and food experimentation!

 

[Hollywood Chickens]

I use the whole sour and then separate a piece of dough from that batch and set that to sour and use it in the next batch of dough.

 

[ArabiansR2Cool]

Would it work to use cultured buttermilk rather than milk in the original recipe?

 

[BirdMom]

Would it work to use cultured buttermilk rather than milk in the original recipe?

It might, but you're going to have things in your sourdough that will change the whole character of it. What you put in it at the beginning is going to be there in gradually decreasing amounts for a long time, and it won't be a "true" sourdough.

There are a lot of different ways to do it, I've tried quite a few, and some of them seem to take off well at first, but quickly flatten and turn awful. The only one that has ever worked for me is the above method, and it turned out wonderful sourdough that was just like the San Francisco Sourdough I used to get out West.

Some of it may depend on where you are in the country or the world, and the temperatures where you are. You'll just have to experiment and see what you get. Which to me is half the fun of cooking, the experimentation!

 

[justbugged]

Check this link and thread. http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/1959/care-and-feeding-sourdough-starter

I have a beautiful starter based off of this method.

 

[BirdMom]

Here are some pages I checked out about sourdough. There are varying degrees of knowledge about it on them, I just sort of gleaned a bit here and a bit there and experimented till I found what works.

I think part of the problem with the recipe the original poster showed was the huge amount of sugar in it. You're just going to get an alcohol type thing with all that sugar, not a yeast thing. Too much sugar actually retards the growth of yeast. They get enough natural sugars from the flour. Ah, now I understand that recipe, that's the starter for the Amish Friendship Bread Recipe. That won't work for regular bread or any other recipe for Sourdough.

http://www.exploratorium.edu/cooking/bread/recipe-sourdough.html

http://www.howstuffworks.com/framed...wais/html/na-dir/food/sourdough/starters.html

http://allrecipes.com/HowTo/Sourdough-Starters/Detail.aspx

http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?/topic/27634-sourdough-bread/

http://www.sourdoughhome.com/

Those are just some of my favorite places to read about sourdough, and there are a lot of recipes on them, too. Good luck!