4 week old starter, rollercoaster of smells and bake results. Any advice?
I have my 4 week old starter, maybe its 5 weeks, I'm not entirely sure but lets say 4...
Feeding 50:50 plain(ap), wholemeal throughout.
I have a cheapo proofing box from Amazon, that seems to work quite well, my Thermapen says it is the temperature that i tell it to be, so i say it works. I have tried a few different temps, but settled on 24C (75 in American)
Creating the starter went quite well, was doubling and tripling within about 10 days. The smell was good, or i think it was good, i actually have no idea. But it smelled nice, sweet, yoghurty, yeasty a few other delicious words that made my brain think of tasty bread.
At about day 15 I decided to bake...
Results: Shit!
I didnt know what i was doing, so I followed a recipe to the letter and underproofed.
I did have some pretty nice toast and bruschetta though.
Keen to learn from my mistake, i threw caution to the wind and baked again on day 17.
Result: Even shitterer than #1
The house did smell amazing... so every cloud.
I probably should say that at this point my starter would more than double a 1:1:1 in about 4.5 hours in it's 24C proofer on bake day. It was also happy to consume a 1:4:4 as it's daily feed, peaking after about 8 hours.
After playing some bread rugby, we somewhat reluctantly ate some more under-proofed sourdough.
Fair warning here, eating underproofed sourdough, however delicious it may be, creates quite a bit of wind. Annoyingly, this wind was not created during the bulk phase. So after a weekend of baking, eating bread and farting my little heart out, I decided to wait another week before attempting another loaf.
I fed 1:5:5 every day at 8am, starter lived in the proofer at 24C.
The smells continued to be good, the peaks continued to be predictable, then bake day came again.
i fed my starter a 1:2:2, it peaked at triple the inital size
Followed my recipe all the way to the bulk and... nothing.
10.5 hours later i had about 30% rise on my dough (it was 65% hydration, so i was hoping for close to double). It just didnt want to do anything during the bulk.
It was at 24C the entire time in it's proofer, i thermopen'd the dough, it was 24-25C in the centre.
I was checking the dough every 45 mns and it never got bigger. After the 10.5hrs it was a bit of a sticky mess on the surface. I shaped it, plopped it in the fridge overnight. then baked next morning.
Result: Best so far. Still a bit shit!
It had overproofed - this is the one in the photo btw
After much reading, it sounds like maybe my starter was too acidic?? Breaking down the gluten before it can ferment?
It didn't smell acidic, it smelled kind of delicious, but as i said above I dont really know what I'm doing.
Anyway, this past week I have been trying to 'strengthen a weak starter'
feeding 1:5:5 and trying to not let the starter fully collapse between feedings, which has ended up at twice a day, about 11-12 hours apart. feeding is alway about an hour ish after peak.
NOW MY STARTER SMELLS BAD!
Not like putrid death, or the bin at a cinema. It smells more like a friend's fart, one you can tolerate but you kinda wish they'd at least warned you
It has lost the sweet, yoghurty smell and it is somewhere between alcohol and a little bit cheesy.
I am confused, what the hell is going on?
I have been changing my jar every feed, this is for pure laziness and convenience... Its just easier to start off each feed with a zeroed scale. (Gemini told me this was bad, and could be contributing to my smell change)
I am so confused that I have taken to asking AI for advice, which doesnt seem to work.
No matter what I ask or report, I get 'You are absolutely right... This changes everything' When in reality I think I couldn't be more wrong and changes absolutely nothing.
The recipes i have tried were
https://alexandracooks.com/ bakes 1 & 2
and
https://www.theclevercarrot.com/ -> with slightly increased water content to 300g
I dont think it's the recipe that is the issue.
For absolutely no good reason, I am pretty confident that my starter is the culprit.
Help me!