Tartine book starter with acetone smell after neglecting for a day
Hi folks,
I was following the Tartine Book method, which involves a 1:2:2 feeding just once per morning. My starter was rising slowly over 8-12 hours (my house is usually around 70ºF), and then falling back, but just smelling sourer after 24h.
Then, I accidentally missed a feeding, and got a strong acetone smell. I've been back to the normal routine, but can't get it to go away. I don't particularly want to feed twice a day.
I should note: my whole wheat flour is a year old, and was stored in an open bag. It's not rancid, but it's been making my sourdough bakes flop. So I finally threw it out, and am lodged somewhere around day 11 in the LindleyMills shipping backlog waiting on 50 lbs of bread and 25 of wheat ?. So I started feeding it just the unbleached bread flour (no wholewheat).
I'm wondering whether this is salvagable, or whether I should start over once I get decent flour. I don't really want to do that, since my starter originally took about 10 days to settle down.
Thanks all,
Zellyn
...are often an indication that your beasties are hungry and are running out of food. If you don’t want to feed it more often, try using a 1:3:3 or 1:4:4 feeding ratio. When you get your whole wheat flour you can just go back to using it. The bread flour should be just fine alone for the interim.
-Brad
I've seen people posting that going to 1:3:3 or 1:5:5 will make your starter “stronger”. I don't really want that: part of the Tartine recipe is keeping the starter “young”, so I don't want it to get wildly quicker at devouring the flour. I may try a higher ratio for a bit just to get rid of the acetone-creating denizens, then wean it back to the normal Tartine 1/day feeding…
If you’re committed to feeding once a day, you need to change the ratio. If you don’t, your starter will overmature (as it is clearly doing already!)
If you are thinking that strong means more acidic, I don’t think that a 1:3:3 will do that. You are still making a 100% hydration starter and the generally accepted practice is that a low hydration, say 50% where flour weight is twice the water weight, will encourage the acetic acid LAB over the lactic acid LAB. (By the way, just to clarify, I’m using 1:3:3 ratio as starter:water:flour.) By reducing the inoculation amount you will just be stretching out the time until it reaches maturity.
In my experience, this works just fine. I always adjust my inoculation amount so that it works with my schedule. If I want to build a levain overnight so that I can mix a dough in the morning, I may use 1:10:10, but if I want to build a levain in the morning and mix a dough at noon, a 1:1:1 ratio will mature in 4-5 hours with my starter. My breads are pleasantly lactic acid tangy and not vinegary acetic acid. My standard breads use hydration and techniques similar to Tartine.
-Brad
Thanks, that makes sense. Yeah, by “strong” I just meant that in some discussions on these forums, people suggested that higher ratios like 1:5:5 would lead to the yeast culture being more powerful/healthy/active. I wasn't sure whether routinely adding a large excess of available food would push the culture towards the most quickly metabolizing yeast variants… sounds like it's simply exponential growth, which makes sense and is reassuring.
I think you are misinterpreting something. I haven't read this book, so I don't know exactly what it says. But I think in this context, a "young" starter refers to where it is in that particular feeding cycle. I'm going to use the term "not quite ripe" to try to make it more clear. When you feed your starter, at first it is very not even slightly ripe yet. Depending on the feeding ratio and temperature and the activity of your starter and the flour you fed it and other factors, it'll get to "not quite ripe" sometime in the next several hours. After it hits that point, it continues to ripen until it is very ripe and eventually over ripe. At some point in this cycle, you feed it and it goes back to the beginning and repeats the cycle. To keep your starter "young", or "not quite ripe", you need to feed it enough, and feed it often enough, that it never gets fully ripe or over ripe.
Try reading the relevant section(s) of the book again with that meaning for a "young" starter in mind, and see if it seems to fit. If so, you'll need to adjust your feeding schedule accordingly. If not, I don't have a clue because a small & infrequent feeding schedule does not fit what I thought I had learned about that book from what others have said.
Even if Robertson does intend for his instructions to be to feed 1:2:2 1x/day forever (maybe he just meant the first few weeks while the starter is developing?), it doesn't mean that feeding schedule will work for all people in all situations. You still have to adapt the recipe to fit your individual circumstances.
Yep, by “young” I simply meant “early in the cycle” / “low percentage of the flour metabolized so far”, which agrees with what you're saying.
The surprising thing to me was that it was working so well at 1:2:2 with only daily feedings of 50/50 bread/wholewheat flour. It would definitely rise up in 8-10 hours or so (the cupboard where I keep my starter is around 70-72º), then collapse down again, and would get progressively sourer-smelling, but the strong acetone smell never happened until after the first missed feeding.
Ok here’s the deal.
Don’t have Tartine in front of me, but no way is it a once a day feeding. They’re all about frequent refreshing, active starter, low acid load, using young levain etc
Your starter is smelling that way cause you’re not feeding it enough. Whatever flour you have is likely fine. But whole wheat flour (or any whole grain) will ferment much faster than white flour.
If I were you, I’d get over the aversion to feeding twice a day. Feed it morning and night until it’s doubling reliably. Once it’s active and reliable, you can just keep it in the fridge until you want to build the levain.
Oh, and 10 days isn’t that long.. it may not be be strong enough (probably isn’t). But there’s no reason to lose that progress! Keep feeding it whatever you have.
Oh and while you’re trying to get it on that 2/day schedule, you may have to adjust your inoculation ratio, water/ambient temp, etc to get it to rise and fall when you want it to.
It was definitely doing great at 1/day for 20 or 30 days. It would rise up slowly (it's in an air-conditioned environment, probably around 70º), and then collapse down, but only smell a bit too sour, and have a lovely gluey consistency. The Levain is kept “young” by using a much lower inoculation: 1 tablespoon (20g or so) with 200g water, 200g flour.
The once-per-day Tartine feeding regimen certainly is surprising, compared to almost all the advice I've since read on starters. (Here's an online summary: https://www.marthastewart.com/1130184/tartine-country-bread). I'm a total bread newbie, so I only started reading intensively once my bread started flopping, although I've since chalked that up to my horribly old flour :-) We'll see once the Lindley Mills order arrives…
First of all, I would guess it was not going well. I would say it was teetering on the edge of collapse and that's why it got that persistent acetone smell after only a single missed feeding.
The feeding you describe in this post is 20:200:200 or 1:10:10, which is not what you are describing in the rest of the thread. Here you talk about keeping it "young" by using a lower inoculation. That's just different words for using bigger feedings. "Lower inoculation" and "bigger feeding" mean the exact same thing. Which is what everyone is advising you to do.
Yep, the Levain feeding is 1:10:10, since you want to leave it overnight. The normal starter feeding is 1:2:2 with 50/50 bread/wholewheat flour. The idea that it was teetering on the edge of collapse is very interesting. That does not match my instincts from watching/smelling/feeling the starter over a month or two, but I'm incredibly new at this, so my instincts are probably wrong :-)
I have some good flour arriving this evening, so hopefully going back to the rigorous regimen from the Tartine book with good flour will rescue poor Tina from her plight.
Hi folks. Just wanted to post an update on this thread. I finally decided to simply trust the instructions in the Tartine Bread book. Using my new good flour (Lindley Mills!), I simply started feeding it at the recommended 1:2:2 ratio, once per day at the same time. It is still a little off from where it was at its best, but is dramatically recovered. I would love to understand the chemistry/biology of what happened, but for now, I'm content that Tina is doing well, and my bread is tasting like Tartine Bread again. Now I just need to solve the over-proofing problem so it'll actually rise ?
My starter was absolutely fine with once a day feedings and doing great. As soon as it got hot outside it has started smelling like acetone too. It seems to still rise fine but I dont like the smell haha.