Sourdough!
Third time's the charm? I'll find out for sure tomorrow. Maybe.
ANYWAY. So I kept the previous Sourdough 2.0 going for the full 14 days asked by the Wild Sourdough Project, although I started 2 versions of the Serious Eats sourdough (links for all of these in previous posts--see 'sourdough' tag), one using tap water and one using bottled water to check if our water was to blame for killing the previous starter attempts.
Result: our water is perfectly fine. Either the yeast doesn't give a damn about the chloramine our city's water is treated with, or our whole house water filter (installed by the original owners) is doing a damn good job of it.
But let me get back to the Sourdough 2.0 starters. They smelled TERRIBLE. Very sour, yes, but not in a good way. And on Day 14, I noticed the whole wheat one had mold on it, so I just tossed it. I didn't toss the other because the Project wanted data on failed starters also.
So I faithfully did the Day 15 thing of taking 2 tablespoons of the muck in the jar and feeding it, and faithfully measuring the exactly zero millimeters it increased in size. And then set to put my data into the Project's web interface.
Whereupon it asked me to put in the measurement data I had been keeping EVERY DAY of the entire project, which was NOT IN ANY OF THE INSTRUCTIONS and I said THE HELL WITH YOU and tossed it out, also.
And thus my participation in the Wild Sourdough Project came to a rather smelly end. Why do I think those starters failed? More on that anon.
So! Sourdough 3.0! From Serious Eats. Which I liked, because it did not involve any discarding while growing the starter--you just add, basically, an ounce of flour and an ounce of water per day. You don't bother with discarding it unless you're feeding it up for cooking and have too much.
I also got tired of the Mason jars and ordered some jars more easily used. When I was reading around, it turns out that Weck jars are most often recommended because they have wide mouths and straight, slanted sides that are easily scraped clean. Of course, because lots of people are doing sourdough at home since yeast is hard to come by, there are no Weck jars to be had from my usual suppliers of kitchenware. But The Container Store nearby had both these very similar Anchor Hocking jars and curbside delivery, I ordered the last 3 of the 1 quart size they had in stock. (At the time. They seem to have gotten more.) 1 quart is really way too big, but they didn't have the smaller one in stock.
I transferred the three starters I'd created (Three? you say. I thought you had two? More on that anon, also) into the AH jars and from then on I had significantly better results. Both the tap water and the bottled water versions are doing JUST FINE.
I think my problem was that the Mason jars, even though the ones we had were wide-mouthed, had sides that were too difficult to scrape down, and thus mold and nasty bacteria found it easier to colonize and overwhelm the yeast. The only starter page I'd found that even mentioned scraping the sides of the jar down was the Wild Sourdough Project page, which explained why you wanted to. But I didn't recall seeing it anywhere else. I have no idea why nobody else mentions it.
Before I got the new jars, I'd started swapping jars for the starters--every other day, pouring the starter into a new, clean jar and putting the old one through the wash. That got real old real quick, hence the purchase of the AH jars.
Anyway! My new jars are really too wide for new starters, and don't show much rise at the moment (not that I'd been feeding them much, according to the Serious Eats recipe), but they smell like food and not like yuck. I still need to take the starter out and wash the sides of the jar every so often, but it's not that big a deal.
I'll eventually get bored of playing with the starter and then I'll transfer the one or ones I want to keep into a Mason jar and shove it into the fridge for longer-term storage, and then we can use the AH jars for other things. (They can be frozen, are dishwasher safe, microwave safe, AND can be put in the oven up to 425°F! Not direct from frozen of course, but hey!)
Back to the third starter! I'd read that some people used an acidic liquid to bypass the first few days of a starter, where it has 2 or 3 generations of different types of bacteria arise, each one making the starter a little more acidic, then dying off when it's too acidic to survive, to be replaced by another type, etc. And I found a nice explanation of all of this, plus directions for using pineapple juice in your starter at a site called TheFreshLoaf.com, written by microbiologist Deborah Wink (and do check out the comments--lots of good advice she's giving to people there). If you've got a recipe app that scrapes websites, like Paprika, the one we use, you can find it in scrape-able format at savorthebest.com.
And coincidentally, we had 5 small cans of unsweetened pineapple juice in the pantry from some recipe a few months back that called for a couple of tablespoons of the stuff, and the only pineapple juice we could find was a small six-pack.
Hence, starter number 3. Pineapple juice and bottled water, since when I started it I wasn't sure if the tap water one was viable or not.
Number 3 also has a 50/50 mix of buckwheat and white flour. I'd wanted to try rye, said to have a lot of nutrition that yeast adores, but there is no rye flour to be had for love nor money in this town. But Central Markup had small amounts of buckwheat so I bought it. And after a bit of research: yes, even though buckwheat is not wheat it works in starters just fine. And contains no gluten: you can make a gluten-free starter using brown rice flour and buckwheat flour (here or search online for others) that will enable you to make gluten-free sourdough bread (one recipe).
Because of the no-gluten thing, I expect that before Number 3 ends up mostly white flour (I'm going to transition it because buckwheat's kind of expensive at the moment, and we have white flour in the freezer) it'll be better for recipes like pancakes, cracker, etc., stuff that uses the sourdough starter mostly for flavor and not really for lift, as it won't have as much gluten in it as a wheat-based starter starter.
Anyway! So once they started developing smells, the white flour starters, Number 1 (tap water) and Number 2 (bottled water) started smelling rather buttermilk, then tangy cheese, and have settled on, for now, salt and vinegar chips. A bit of reading says that the bacteria they're mostly colonized with produce acetic acid, and if you like the vinegar tang in your sourdough goods, you can encourage it by starving your starter, as a hungry starter produces more of this, stirring the hooch that forms on top when it's hungry back in as the hooch contains ethanol and other vinegary-substances, and by storing your starter at cooler temps. I'd been putting the 2.0 starters in the oven with the oven light on to make them warmer than the rest of the kitchen, but the oven light burned out and we only just managed to get a replacement for it, so the 3.0 starters have been sitting out at temps between 67-75°F.
(edit: Warmer temps, more frequent feedings, and pouring off the hooch all encourage lactic-acid producing bacteria, which are milder.)
I have a folding bread proofer and slow cooker on orderbecause I am insane because it can be used for slow cooking and FOLDS UP to be PUT AWAY, unlike our current slow cooker**, but of course crazed breadmakers have bought them out and mine won't ship until mid-June. I look forward to experimenting with warmer storage, more frequent feedings, and other ways to change the flavor.
**which will be kept, but no longer out on the kitchen counter. It'll be shoved into a closet until we need it.
It being Day Nine of Number 1's existence, I have taken 4 ounces out and fed it to be used tomorrow for baking bread. Wish me luck! I also fed the remaining starter an extra load of flour and water so that I will have enough to get started on making pizza dough tomorrow for, hopefully, pizza on Saturday.
What about Number 3? you ask. Let me tell you about Number 3. Number 3 is AMAAAAZING. Number 3 smelled like pineapple juice, pineapple juice, pineapple juice, warm pineapple juice and then all of a sudden, today it SMELLED LIKE BREAD. A slightly fruity bread to be sure, but BREAD.
I have also fed Number 3 a load of flour (75%ish white, 25%ish buckwheat) to fatten it up for trying either these sourdough crackers from King Arthur Flour or these sourdough crackers from LoveAndOliveOil.com.
ENOUGH TYPING. You want PICTURES. Of course you do. They're not terribly thrilling, really. :) They're also taken right after I fed them and stirred them, so they're really not thrilling.
Number 1: white flour and tap water. Number 1 and Number 2 look like ranch dressing because I dropped a tablespoon or so of buckwheat into them a couple of days ago. It seems to have done them no harm. :)
The blue tape marks the level of the starter right after being fed so I can see if they rise or not. They don't rise very much because (a) in a too-wide container and (b) they only get fed an ounce of flour and water a day. Until today, when I dumped in two cups of flour and an equivalent weight of water (I meant to dump in 1 cup of flour, but mis-measured my water and had to add more flour to compensate).
Number 2: White flour and bottled water. Out of focus, but bubbly. It's due to be removed from its jar, the jar washed, then put back in tomorrow.
Numbers 1 and 2, since it looks like our tap water is JUST FINE, are destined to be mixed together at some point in the not-terribly-far future, provided they both still seem viable. No point in keeping them separate.
And Number 3, my buckwheat-and-pineapple mix. It looks like Dijon mustard and smells like BREAD.
And the starter I have taken out of Number 1 and prepared for baking tomorrow.
And finally, your reward for sticking through all these words about sourdough starter: a photo of D.Va wearing a small knit hat!
The hat is![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
myrialux's test of a pattern he thought up, knitted in miniature and in some not-that-great yarn so as not to waste a bunch of good yarn. D.Va wore it for about 5 seconds before shaking it off, but she looked ADORABLE for those 5 seconds.
ANYWAY. So I kept the previous Sourdough 2.0 going for the full 14 days asked by the Wild Sourdough Project, although I started 2 versions of the Serious Eats sourdough (links for all of these in previous posts--see 'sourdough' tag), one using tap water and one using bottled water to check if our water was to blame for killing the previous starter attempts.
Result: our water is perfectly fine. Either the yeast doesn't give a damn about the chloramine our city's water is treated with, or our whole house water filter (installed by the original owners) is doing a damn good job of it.
But let me get back to the Sourdough 2.0 starters. They smelled TERRIBLE. Very sour, yes, but not in a good way. And on Day 14, I noticed the whole wheat one had mold on it, so I just tossed it. I didn't toss the other because the Project wanted data on failed starters also.
So I faithfully did the Day 15 thing of taking 2 tablespoons of the muck in the jar and feeding it, and faithfully measuring the exactly zero millimeters it increased in size. And then set to put my data into the Project's web interface.
Whereupon it asked me to put in the measurement data I had been keeping EVERY DAY of the entire project, which was NOT IN ANY OF THE INSTRUCTIONS and I said THE HELL WITH YOU and tossed it out, also.
And thus my participation in the Wild Sourdough Project came to a rather smelly end. Why do I think those starters failed? More on that anon.
So! Sourdough 3.0! From Serious Eats. Which I liked, because it did not involve any discarding while growing the starter--you just add, basically, an ounce of flour and an ounce of water per day. You don't bother with discarding it unless you're feeding it up for cooking and have too much.
I also got tired of the Mason jars and ordered some jars more easily used. When I was reading around, it turns out that Weck jars are most often recommended because they have wide mouths and straight, slanted sides that are easily scraped clean. Of course, because lots of people are doing sourdough at home since yeast is hard to come by, there are no Weck jars to be had from my usual suppliers of kitchenware. But The Container Store nearby had both these very similar Anchor Hocking jars and curbside delivery, I ordered the last 3 of the 1 quart size they had in stock. (At the time. They seem to have gotten more.) 1 quart is really way too big, but they didn't have the smaller one in stock.
I transferred the three starters I'd created (Three? you say. I thought you had two? More on that anon, also) into the AH jars and from then on I had significantly better results. Both the tap water and the bottled water versions are doing JUST FINE.
I think my problem was that the Mason jars, even though the ones we had were wide-mouthed, had sides that were too difficult to scrape down, and thus mold and nasty bacteria found it easier to colonize and overwhelm the yeast. The only starter page I'd found that even mentioned scraping the sides of the jar down was the Wild Sourdough Project page, which explained why you wanted to. But I didn't recall seeing it anywhere else. I have no idea why nobody else mentions it.
Before I got the new jars, I'd started swapping jars for the starters--every other day, pouring the starter into a new, clean jar and putting the old one through the wash. That got real old real quick, hence the purchase of the AH jars.
Anyway! My new jars are really too wide for new starters, and don't show much rise at the moment (not that I'd been feeding them much, according to the Serious Eats recipe), but they smell like food and not like yuck. I still need to take the starter out and wash the sides of the jar every so often, but it's not that big a deal.
I'll eventually get bored of playing with the starter and then I'll transfer the one or ones I want to keep into a Mason jar and shove it into the fridge for longer-term storage, and then we can use the AH jars for other things. (They can be frozen, are dishwasher safe, microwave safe, AND can be put in the oven up to 425°F! Not direct from frozen of course, but hey!)
Back to the third starter! I'd read that some people used an acidic liquid to bypass the first few days of a starter, where it has 2 or 3 generations of different types of bacteria arise, each one making the starter a little more acidic, then dying off when it's too acidic to survive, to be replaced by another type, etc. And I found a nice explanation of all of this, plus directions for using pineapple juice in your starter at a site called TheFreshLoaf.com, written by microbiologist Deborah Wink (and do check out the comments--lots of good advice she's giving to people there). If you've got a recipe app that scrapes websites, like Paprika, the one we use, you can find it in scrape-able format at savorthebest.com.
And coincidentally, we had 5 small cans of unsweetened pineapple juice in the pantry from some recipe a few months back that called for a couple of tablespoons of the stuff, and the only pineapple juice we could find was a small six-pack.
Hence, starter number 3. Pineapple juice and bottled water, since when I started it I wasn't sure if the tap water one was viable or not.
Number 3 also has a 50/50 mix of buckwheat and white flour. I'd wanted to try rye, said to have a lot of nutrition that yeast adores, but there is no rye flour to be had for love nor money in this town. But Central Markup had small amounts of buckwheat so I bought it. And after a bit of research: yes, even though buckwheat is not wheat it works in starters just fine. And contains no gluten: you can make a gluten-free starter using brown rice flour and buckwheat flour (here or search online for others) that will enable you to make gluten-free sourdough bread (one recipe).
Because of the no-gluten thing, I expect that before Number 3 ends up mostly white flour (I'm going to transition it because buckwheat's kind of expensive at the moment, and we have white flour in the freezer) it'll be better for recipes like pancakes, cracker, etc., stuff that uses the sourdough starter mostly for flavor and not really for lift, as it won't have as much gluten in it as a wheat-based starter starter.
Anyway! So once they started developing smells, the white flour starters, Number 1 (tap water) and Number 2 (bottled water) started smelling rather buttermilk, then tangy cheese, and have settled on, for now, salt and vinegar chips. A bit of reading says that the bacteria they're mostly colonized with produce acetic acid, and if you like the vinegar tang in your sourdough goods, you can encourage it by starving your starter, as a hungry starter produces more of this, stirring the hooch that forms on top when it's hungry back in as the hooch contains ethanol and other vinegary-substances, and by storing your starter at cooler temps. I'd been putting the 2.0 starters in the oven with the oven light on to make them warmer than the rest of the kitchen, but the oven light burned out and we only just managed to get a replacement for it, so the 3.0 starters have been sitting out at temps between 67-75°F.
(edit: Warmer temps, more frequent feedings, and pouring off the hooch all encourage lactic-acid producing bacteria, which are milder.)
I have a folding bread proofer and slow cooker on order
**which will be kept, but no longer out on the kitchen counter. It'll be shoved into a closet until we need it.
It being Day Nine of Number 1's existence, I have taken 4 ounces out and fed it to be used tomorrow for baking bread. Wish me luck! I also fed the remaining starter an extra load of flour and water so that I will have enough to get started on making pizza dough tomorrow for, hopefully, pizza on Saturday.
What about Number 3? you ask. Let me tell you about Number 3. Number 3 is AMAAAAZING. Number 3 smelled like pineapple juice, pineapple juice, pineapple juice, warm pineapple juice and then all of a sudden, today it SMELLED LIKE BREAD. A slightly fruity bread to be sure, but BREAD.
I have also fed Number 3 a load of flour (75%ish white, 25%ish buckwheat) to fatten it up for trying either these sourdough crackers from King Arthur Flour or these sourdough crackers from LoveAndOliveOil.com.
ENOUGH TYPING. You want PICTURES. Of course you do. They're not terribly thrilling, really. :) They're also taken right after I fed them and stirred them, so they're really not thrilling.
Number 1: white flour and tap water. Number 1 and Number 2 look like ranch dressing because I dropped a tablespoon or so of buckwheat into them a couple of days ago. It seems to have done them no harm. :)
The blue tape marks the level of the starter right after being fed so I can see if they rise or not. They don't rise very much because (a) in a too-wide container and (b) they only get fed an ounce of flour and water a day. Until today, when I dumped in two cups of flour and an equivalent weight of water (I meant to dump in 1 cup of flour, but mis-measured my water and had to add more flour to compensate).
Number 2: White flour and bottled water. Out of focus, but bubbly. It's due to be removed from its jar, the jar washed, then put back in tomorrow.
Numbers 1 and 2, since it looks like our tap water is JUST FINE, are destined to be mixed together at some point in the not-terribly-far future, provided they both still seem viable. No point in keeping them separate.
And Number 3, my buckwheat-and-pineapple mix. It looks like Dijon mustard and smells like BREAD.
And the starter I have taken out of Number 1 and prepared for baking tomorrow.
And finally, your reward for sticking through all these words about sourdough starter: a photo of D.Va wearing a small knit hat!
The hat is
myrialux's test of a pattern he thought up, knitted in miniature and in some not-that-great yarn so as not to waste a bunch of good yarn. D.Va wore it for about 5 seconds before shaking it off, but she looked ADORABLE for those 5 seconds.
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Ahahahaha sourdxough. XD
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(The buckwheat starter is HUNGRY today! Will be posting a picture later...)
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