Here’s the thing- I tried the sour dough bread thing during covid and over thought it all. Measured every step and never got a good loaf then gave up.
I’m going into it this time with the mindset of who actually cares people did this shit in caves so I can do it now.
But I started my started a week ago and it’s barely had a good rise lol
Can everyone chime in and tell me how long they were stuck in that weird slump after false rises? I’m on day 8 (total) and feeling discouraged. That false stage around 3-4 really got my expectations up even though I knew it was bacterial.
As the title says. Wife and i started this starter three months ago. The start was rough but then we started 1:1:1 feeds with whole wheat. We were having great rises. Sometimes it was doubling within 8 hours 2-3 times a day. It seemed like a really strong starter. We then started to taper off the WW and add in AP instead. We noticed the rises were SIGNIFICANTLY weaker. So instead of just switching completely to AP i added it over time. Well when i was at like 80% AP and 20% WW mix, i had a n ok rise within like 16 hours but not great. But it did double. I figured it was ready for 100%.
Ive done 100% a couple of times now and over like 24 hours the rise is so slow. I figured thickness of the starter was an issue so i added a bit more AP (i think the bubbles were escaping) but its still not rising like it did before with the WW.
Its been over 24 hours since last feed. Hasnt really doubled but it has risen a good bit. Should i just keep feeding it 100% AP until it behaves? Or should i reincorporate the WW?
I know most recipes call for AP so Im afraid if i try to make a loaf with a starter that isnt cooperating with AP that my loaf will be a dud.
I just saw this comment on Instagram and want to hear people’s opinions of this here:
“I don't discard anymore. I just take what I need out of my jar and feed it. If I have extra fed starter left, I put it back in my starter jar.”
Anyone ever seen it turn purple? I fed it 18hrs ago. I did feed with a different flour that had higher protien content. 5wk old starter.
Kevin is officially 3 weeks old and is now consistently rising. Im feeding him every twelve hours with 30g whole wheat flour to 30g spring water to 30g starter, and now Im wondering if he is ready to be baked. This is my first starter, so Im pretty unexperienced in the realm of sourdough starter and knowing when it is ready to be used.
The photo Ive put is his rise after about 7 hours. As said before, this is pretty consistent with his rises over the past week and a half ish. Ive heard that the float test is a sin against the sourdough community, so Im not even going to bring that up, but I am wondering if there is a full proof way of knowing?
My sourdough starter is officially 2 years old so she's strong. I can't believe I started my Sourdough journey 2 years ago and kept my starter alive for 2 years! She's so strong and producing the best bread ever!
After some experimenting, I found my sweet spot:
• 40g sourdough starter
• 40g spring water
• 50g unbleached flour
That combo gives me the perfect, thick pancake-batter consistency — it traps air bubbles and gives a massive 5x rise! I use a simple hair tie to mark the starting point so I can see how much it grows.
I used to feed it daily while it was getting strong, but now I feed it every 2–3 days. When it’s bake time, I’ll double or triple the batch depending on what I’m making. And if you’re heading out on vacation — no problem. Pop it in the fridge and start it back up when you return. If your sourdough’s healthy, it’ll spring right back to life.
What are you making from your sourdough this week?
Okay I recently moved and FORGOT MY STARTER!!! I was devastated. It would of almost been a year old. Anyways im starting fresh. When I first made my starter I did 50 wheat and 50 bread flour. Only for the very first feeding then only bread flour. Well today is the day I want to start and I cannot find a small bag of wheat flour and I dont want to waste a whole bag of flour. My question is can I start a starter with just bread flour? Im using the King Arthur brand. In the ingredients it does say it have hard red wheat flour.
I started this on the 1st of April from scratch, though I had it in the fridge for about 20 days since the 17th, with a feeding ratio of 1:10:10.
When I took it out, I started to do a feeding ratio of 1:2:2, with 50% strong white flour and 50% wheat meal flour. I use 25g of starter on every refresh.
I started feeding it peak to peak, but after I saw no progress, I decided to feed it every 24h. It improved a bit, but I've been doing this for at least 2 weeks now, and I don't see it tripling as it did before it went to the fridge.
As you can see in the video, it's over 12 hours, and it hasn't doubled. Yesterday I decided to make it starve a bit, so I waited about 36h for the next feeding, and though it doubled, I found it interesting that it didn't reduce much and still had a lot of bubbles. The smell was a bit more acidic than usual, I have to say.
Maybe some of you recognise where the jar is, it's an X1C 3D printer that I'm using as a fermentation chamber. I have the plate constantly at 23 °C.
I tried to bake a loaf on the 16th of April, and this was the result: https://www.reddit.com/r/Sourdough/comments/1spuk6k/crumb_feeling_wet_for_the_forth_time/
Maybe it's ready, and it's just slow?
Any advice?
I received a starter from a friend of mine. The only place warm enough in my house is the oven, but now it may be too warm? The starter smells like yeast and has bubbles,but I cannot get it to rise. I’m doing 1:2:2 but it’s as crumbly as a pie dough. I added water until it reached pancake batter consistency. No luck. Any suggestions?
My starter is 3 months old and was doing good, we've been making cheeze-its with the discard, they are really good. All of a sudden my starter started rising so fast, in 4 hours and overflowing. Its very sticky and stretchy. I can't even spread it. What's happening?
A few days ago I made a post asking for some advice with my young starter and got some really good advice so thank you r/sourdoughstarter for the help. In that post I posted a screenshot of a sourdough monitoring dashboard and there was some interest in what I built so I figured I’d post what I built.
At its core it’s really just an ESP32-c3 that uses a time of flight sensor to measure the distance from the lid to the top of the starter and uses that value to calculate how much the starter has risen. It sends and logs that data via MQTT to my Home Assistant dashboard which I have hung on the wall in my kitchen next to my stove. It also logs temperature and humidity as well as the time since the starter was last fed. I can trigger a feed from either the button on top or from the button on the dashboard and that tells the device to reset the rise percentage and log a new baseline height for the starter. Battery life is still up in the air but it’s looking like probably at least a month between charges so that works for me.
The plan going forward is to begin logging the data in a more robust accessible database so I can use it to create some predictive algorithms for rise times in different temperatures and humidity.
It’s overkill but I’m enjoying the pretty graph and it scratches a little itch in my brain so I’m happy with the results.
Just to be clear I’m not selling anything. I built most of the code for the firmware with AI. This is just a personal project I wanted to show off.
My starter is about 2.5 weeks old and I forgot to feed it yesterday. I opened it today to feed it and this is what it looks like. It also kind of smells like feet? Is this mold?
ETA: it’s the same color throughout, those are just shadows from kitchen lighting.
I am high-fiveing my forehead because I should have taken a picture so sorry if that it needed.
This is the my first time making a starter. I started with 50g flour and 50g water. I stirred until it was thick like pancake batter. Covered with two coffee filters as a “lid”. 24 hours later I returned, there was some bubbles on top so moved forward with discard and feeding with 1:1 ratio. 24 hours later there was no rise seen but a liquid I determined to be hooch on top. I drained half the hooch, discard, and fed 1:1 ration. Day 3 (24 hours after first hooch finding) once again had quite a bit hooch with no rise seen. Discard and 1:1 ratio again. Last night was day 4, once again quite a bit of hooch (drained some) did discard and feeding but did 50g flour and 25g water this time. I checked this morning and still no rise just a lot of little bubbles on top. The house is kept at 73 degrees, I just don’t know what I’m doing wrong. I figured tonight or tomorrow I might do a float test but I am not too optimistic. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks!
So my starter had been left in the fridge for months and had a nice layer of hooch. I poured it out, stirred the starter, put it into a new jar and fed it. I used King Arthurs bread flour and equal ratios. Left it overnight for eight hours. Nothing rose but there are a couple bubbles. Do I do another feeding and leave it out again?
Hello!! I'm back. I've been taking good care of Kevin and I watched him closely. I skipped in total 2 days of feeding and two days ago fed him and he started going up again like crazy.
The picture was taken about 4 hours of feeding and it still has that dome shape on top. It built a slightly sour smell over the past few days. This is now day 10 of this starter.
My question is when I can start to put the discard into a separate jar in the fridge for discard recipes. I'm already looking forward to doing some of those! I saw one forest discard waffles or pizza. Would that even work?
Anyways... thanks for the help in advance!!