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starter woes - IPA aroma, dead after few days

chleba's picture
chleba

starter woes - IPA aroma, dead after few days

Hi:

I finally had a starter and a process where I could reliably bake sourdough and have a decent crumb, and had kept it going for over a year.  The concept of "when is it ready" has always been very difficult to grasp for me, but I digress.  I accidentally used up my starter on a total brain fart.  No worries, I've been successful in creating a starter following the Debra Wink process here, or TPL's.

However, this time I decided to try a starter from sourdough.com, because my starters over the years I've been baking, never had that acetic acid "sour" flavor no matter what techniques I used - temperature, feeding, etc.  I'd been eyeing one of them and thought I'd give it a shot!  I followed their directions and by day 5 it was covered in black mold.  Yuck.  Tossed it and tried my own starter following Debra Wink process with pineapple juice.  It began to show promise by day 6, showing a little bubble and activity, however, the aroma was... weird: isopropyl alcohol (aka rubbing alcohol).  Very distinct, sharp, acrid aroma.  No hooch.  The starter tasted slightly sour.  By day 8 it stopped all activity, and by day 14 nothing, nada, zip.  It maintained this awful IPA aroma, however.  I pronounced it dead, and started from scratch again with the TPL process.  Day 4 showed great activity and each day there after I had predictable rise/fall in 12 hours.  Decided to try a test dough yesterday, day 7.

My process uses a small sample of the dough to monitor rise.  After 5-6 hours in bulk, there was almost no activity, so I let it keep going.  By 12 hours, the sample dough had several small bubbles, but showed zero rise.  Decided to shape it and let it proof overnight.  By next morning, my dough sample had a lot of bubbles, but no rise.  The dough itself showed no rise, I was curious so baked it anyway.  There was no oven spring, bread was heavy but thumped hollow.  Crumb shows signs of fermentation (very small cells), and tastes like a vinegar bomb.

Meantime, my starter continued to rise and fall in the 12 hour period.  And once again, it smells distinctly of isopropyl alcohol.

Any idea what's going on?  I'm using california grown rye berries which I ground in a vitamix, CM abc+ flour, and crystal geyser bottled water.  I keep temperature at a fixed 76F in my wine fridge, which is connected to an inkbird.

I feel like my starter is purely bacterial, with no yeast?  I'm not sure whether to keep going with this starter and try baking again in a few days, or stop, give it a break for a couple months, and come back to it.

chleba's picture
chleba

Hi:

The above long version shortened down: I tried to make a starter twice, and failed.

Since then, I've failed two more times.  Attempt #3 was a typical feed/discard, using my temp-controlled fridge at 74F, and after about day 7, I had activity, which remained for about a week, lots of bubbles daily and consistently, but no rise, and eventually no more activity and had black mold atop.

Attempt #4 was Debra Wink's pineapple method which I had success with a few years back, I stayed out of my temp-controlled fridge and just remained at room temp in my kitchen (averages to ~70F, +/- 2F, this has been plotted).  Day 4 showed activity, and by day 7 I had a predictable 20% rise.  With a little testing, I had to do 3:1:1 feeding to get the rise, otherwise, it was just bubbles and no rise.  Flower was rye and apf mixture after the initial rye only.

Now, week 3 in #4, the rising has completely stopped and mold showed up again.

What on earth is going on :(  I've never had these kinds of problems :(

Phazm's picture
Phazm

Worth repeating (maybe not to you ... but ...) here goes. Start small and thick - wait till it thins out - thicken up again - repeat till it's a starter. May take a few weeks, but worth it. Enjoy!