Sour dough bread - Noob. Starter not looking good.

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jameshenry on 19 Feb 2016 at 12:43

I'm following this recipe. 

http://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/sourdough-starter-recipe

I used 1 cup of this

and a 1/2 cup of spring water

and it looks like this. 

I was told to use exact measurements. But it looks too thick. 

 

Different starters have different hydration percentages and yours looks just fine for a lower hydration starter. It actually looks just like my Ken Forkish starter which uses half unbleached, half whole wheat flour and is 80% hydration. Over the course of 24 hours, I find that it liquifies quite a bit and it thickens when I feed it. 

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Lazy Loafer on 19 Feb 2016 at 13:51

Try weighing the ingredients instead. That makes it much easier to tell what hydration your starter is. 100% hydration starter will have equal amounts of flour and water BY WEIGHT. 66% hydration will have 66% of the weight of the flour in water (i.e. 100 grams of flour, 66 grams of water).

Different recipes use different hydration starters. I usually keep my mother culture at 100% hydration, but for some breads I use it to make a more firm starter (e.g. 20 grams of mother culture, 100 grams of flour, 66 grams of water).

Also, the texture will change as the starter ripens and develops. It will usually get runnier as it develops.

For reference, half a cup of water should weigh around 125 grams, and a cup of whole wheat flour should weigh around 113 grams, so you've got more or less a 100% hydration blend going there.

Yeah, it's a bit thick, but you're using whole wheat flour (see cstrombe above) and it's the "Old Fashioned" Hodgson Mill ww, which is a coarse grain ww at that.  Not that that's bad, but it's going to be a bit dry/thick.  Give it a few days with the flour you're using, then perhaps switch it to a finer gind if you're looking for a thinner starter.  You might also go up to 5/8 cup of water if you feel your starter is too thick.

It's winter so the relative humidity level in the air is low.  You may have to adjust the moisture to accommodate the dryness of the flour which is incidental with the season.

I tried their recipe 4 different times and never had any success.  I did get some fermentation within a few days but when I followed their directions and switched it over to white flour, that's when my starter stopped.  Others had success with it so I must have done something wrong. 

Its not unusual to have a sourdough stall on about day 3. Stir it twice a day without feeding until it starts rising again, then start feeding.

Well, day 3, I think it's day 3. Wife has been tending to it. It's looking like this now. I guess bubbles are good and it's smelling kinda wanky, which I guess is good also. 

Ordered this as well. 

 

I don't care how long it takes, or how many times I have to do this. I'm going to make sourdough bread myself. It's not going to have aluminum and 400 other ingredients in it, like at the supermarket, which is trying to poison us. It's going to be made with flour, water and salt. DAMMIT :) 

I'll order a book if I have to as well. 

Question, I'm trying to find a recipe for dutch oven. I lost the one I was going to use. Any recommendations? I don't like all sorts of nuts or fruits or any of that crap. Just want plain old sourdough bread. 

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Lazy Loafer on 21 Feb 2016 at 17:57

Yes, I highly recommend Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast as well. There are recipes for bread with a bit (just a bit) of commercial yeast, with wild starters and with both, and they are totally amazing breads for sure.

And your starter is looking pretty good!

I don't need to use yeast though, right? I thought that's what the starter was for, to not have to use yeast. 

If you are asking about FWSY, the book starts with recipes that use yeast and then go to hybrid recipes that use both yeast and sourdough and then to pure sourdough. The idea is to get you used to what dough should feel like and how it behaves. I am quite successful at getting the kinds of breads I like using the hybrid recipes but still working on getting the oven rise I want with the pure sourdough. I can now also manipulate the flour mix so Forkish teaches you all of that in his book. He is extremely precise and detailed in all aspects of the process so it is an awesome book for someone who needed to be taken by the hand like me. My first loaf and actually every loaf baked (except for one that I burned due to my wonky oven) has been delicious. I hope this helps.

Well what I would like to do, is use my dutch oven to make the SD bread, without yeast. I guess I'll have to experiment. 

Sorry, we were maybe a little confusing there. FWSY (the book) has wonderful recipes and techniques for making bread with nothing but flour, water, salt & wild yeast (i.e. sourdough starter), and all the recipes are baked in a Dutch oven. There are other recipes in the book that use a little bit of commercial yeast, but this is to show different techniques, etc. You don't have to try those ones if you don't want.

If you want to check out some of Ken Forkish's methods without getting the book, see his videos on Youtube. They are very useful. I use his techniques all the time now, especially for hand mixing largish batches (up to 4 loaves) without stressing my old hands. In the videos you can clearly see how the dough should look at all stages. He used very wet doughs and some people think their dough looks wrong.