my starter was not doing anything and was very runny and tiny bubbles. I was doing 60g flour ,60g water. On the 6th day I changed to 60g flour 30 g water and within 3 hours my starter was bubbling away and over doubled in volume. Should I refrigerate it now? If I put some in water is stays floating
I assume this was a new starter. I would keep feeding non-chlorine water and whole wheat flour daily for another two weeks. Then you may refrigerate and feed on a basis of once eery two weeks,
Ford
Well done getting this far! You might need to be patient for a while yet however :)
Bubbles definitely indicate microbial activity, which is a good sign, however that doesn’t necessarily mean that your starter has yet developed the right mixture of lactic acid and yeast required to produce bread. Generally a new starter goes through several different phases of development, during which each of several species rise and fall, each contributing to using up the available food, increasing the acidity and generally getting things to the stage where the sourdough yeasts will be able to kick into action.
You may have been lucky and got there very quickly, but don’t be surprised or disheartened if this early activity starts smelling REALLY bad and then seems to have died, That is when many people give up, but in fact it’s a totally natural step along the way, involving a bacterial species called leuconostocs. Once they die out (because the levels of acidity get too high) other process are going ahead slowly and silently in the background - you just have to keep the faith and carry on feeding and discarding and after a week or two things will kick off again and 5is time you will have a baby starter :)
If you want to know more about what’s going on in your starter, have a look at this extremely well informed and interesting post from the archives of this group: pineapple-juice-solution-part-1