Troubleshooting sourdough starter and bread

Hello Permies Who Bake,

Tereza was so kind to suggest I'd post my sourdough starter problems here and ask for the help of you, kind, helpful people.

I'd like to get into sourdough baking, but haven't had any luck with the starter.

I've tried to make a starter a couple of times, and once I got a starter from someone, but it didn't do anything at all, even though I fed it (and obviously tried to rise bread dough with it).

So here's what I've done previously - it's almost two years ago (I gave up), so I'll try to remember and describe as well as I can.

I have Sandor Katz's "The Art of Fermentation" and followed the recipe there:
"The simplest way of starting a sourdough from scratch is to mix a small amount of flour and water in a bocl, a little more flour than water, and stir unil smooth. Add a little more water or flour as necessary to obtain a batter that is liquid and pourable, yet thick enough to cling to the spoon." Etc.

At the time I thought the trouble for the starting never starting was the flour, which was regular wheat flour from the supermarket, or perhaps that the temperature dropped to 17degrees Celsius at night in the kitchen. As I re-read the recipe now I see he's making a point of making sure that the water one uses is un- or dechlorinated. Aha! I used regular tapwater at the time, perhaps that was the trouble.

Any advice or tips are greatly appreciated, I'd like to get baking sourdough bread !
Thank you in advance.

Nina!
I see you are in zone 8-- I am in 9, and I notice my sourdoughs vary a lot depending on the season/climate. Right now I am in summer (Brazil) and my sourdough lives in the refrigerator, if not I have to feed it 5 times a day (or more). I don't think 17°C is too low (and I use city water, which does not lack additives, unfortunately). I also find when it's hot I need to make my sourdough MUUUUUCH thicker than Sandor Katz suggests (mine is almost hard to mix with a spoon), otherwise it rots immediately. In cooler weather, I can have a more runny sourdough (that lives on the counter).

Are you starting with white flour, or using some additive like raisins or fruit? Some people add a bit of rye to start, or use the soaking water from raisins (the one batch of sourdough I did with that was the best I've ever had).
I think the key is really just to keep trying. Mix up your starter, leave it til it bubbles, feed again, and that's really it.

I had my first try at starting a sourdough and utilized the information from the How to create a Sourdough starter thread.

It eventually stalled out due to losing track of it on my end but I'm going to be giving it another attempt.

I've never lived somewhere warm and I've never had any trouble starting or maintaining a starter, so my guess is that that part of Tereza's advice is the key. Right now, I use hand-ground whole wheat or rye (or a mix) flour and well water, but I have used grocery store wheat and white flours and high-choramine tap water and never had a problem. I have also kept starters that were as runny as cream and as thick as dough and both work fine for me in my conditions.

Tereza Okava wrote:Nina!
I see you are in zone 8-- I am in 9, and I notice my sourdoughs vary a lot depending on the season/climate. Right now I am in summer (Brazil) and my sourdough lives in the refrigerator, if not I have to feed it 5 times a day (or more). I don't think 17°C is too low (and I use city water, which does not lack additives, unfortunately). I also find when it's hot I need to make my sourdough MUUUUUCH thicker than Sandor Katz suggests (mine is almost hard to mix with a spoon), otherwise it rots immediately. In cooler weather, I can have a more runny sourdough (that lives on the counter).

Are you starting with white flour, or using some additive like raisins or fruit? Some people add a bit of rye to start, or use the soaking water from raisins (the one batch of sourdough I did with that was the best I've ever had).
I think the key is really just to keep trying. Mix up your starter, leave it til it bubbles, feed again, and that's really it.

Tereza, that's it, my starter attempts rotted every time.
I kept it on the counter top. I can't remember anymore if I attempted to make it in the winter or summer, perhaps freaking out about 17 degrees C at night had to do with another fermenty adventure alltogether?
But instead of a bubbly batch of goodness I got a stinky pot of runny, , dark brown, horrible goo, no matter what.

So I'll try making it thicker - and I'll try making it now, it's winter, so "too hot" isn't a problem.

At that time I tried to make it with biological whole grain flour, I imagined the little bubbly beasties would like that most. I didn't use any additives.
At the moment I don't have any raisins nor rye flour, but I did manage to find locally milled 'artisan' flour for baking, so I'll be using that.
I'm also experimenting with making yoghurt (and eventually cheese) from raw milk since a couple of days.
I'll make two starter batches, one with water, one with yoghurty fermenty liquid. Let's see how it goes...

Thank you for your helpful comments!

Timothy Norton wrote:I had my first try at starting a sourdough and utilized the information from the How to create a Sourdough starter thread.

Hello there Timothy,
Ah! Thank you for that link! I'll go over there to study.

I made my first starter following the advice of the wild yeast blog. The one I have now is from a fancy restaurant (I admired their bread, they said I could have some starter if I want).

I basically wouldn’t be too precious/stressed about it. Most of the time mine is in the fridge, I feed it 1:1:1 the day before I want to bake and leave it out after feeding. Sometimes I make crumpets out of the discard.

If it helps, I started mine (going strong for years and years now, though it does hibernate in the freezer from time to time) by mixing flour, water and commercial yeast:  active dry yeast.  

I just treated it like a starter from then on, and fed it a little every day;  it didn't get very sour for a week or two I guess, but as I fed it and used it it got more sour.  

Several times I've even rescued it from going moldy when I've forgotten to feed it:  even when it was going a bad color with an off smell.  I just feed it a good amount for a few days with a good stir;  the good cultures in it have always been able to get going and kill off the bad yeast and make it the right color and smell again, usually by the next day.

I have had the brown goo problem often enough... it usually does come from not feeding it enough. When I keep sourdough it has to be fed once every two days at the very least. I make the consistency like Sandor Katz describes, a thick pancake batter consistency. When starting out, as soon as I start seeing the very first signs of bubbling and fermenting, I consider it time to start using and feeding it.

It seems good to check to make sure that the flour and water you are using are clean. I haven't had issues with that, using (admittedly questionable) well water and freshly ground flour from organic grain (mostly rye these days).

And too low of a temperature can also cause the brown goo I notice so it may be good to find a warm spot for it. It seems healthiest to me when it is bubbling well after about six hours. If it stays in a cold place, the yeast is sluggish--it doesn't bubble up much, but sours a bit--and most of the fermentation is lactic acid bacteria.

The starter I have now, I started with kombucha.  I can’t remember if it was commercial (GT’s Synergy) or my own which I have kept going for ages.  

(I used the liquid I bought in a bottle.  Brew with honey, in a capped growler about 1/3 cup honey diluted with 3 pints filtered water.  Dissolved and at appropriate temperature, it goes into the growler with the remaining pint of starter.  No mother, no boiling, no sugar, no caffeine.  Since I cap the growler, it gets carbonated, and I think that is also what suppresses the formation of the mother.)

Just thought I would explain that to prevent confusion.  Anyway, the same organisms in the scoby are in the liquid.  I don’t think I could get my sourdough to make kombucha though, because populations drift, but the original kombucha as starter has worked for me.

Some tips for starter troubles:
• There are several ways of creating a starter, and not every method is going to work for every baker - some people mix up flour and water and leave it alone for several days, and sometimes this works, but I find that feeding it every 24 hours, while giving it a stir every 12 hours is more reliable.

• Use wholegrain rye flour to begin a starter or to get it active again - you can switch over to whatever flour you like once it’s active. Wholegrain rye provides lots of minerals, enzymes, bacteria, and yeasts that help to kickstart a starter. Other 100% wholegrain flours are good choices, but rye is the best.

• Use water without chemicals in it to begin your starter. Once your starter is active, you can use town tap water, but in the first week or two it’s best not to.

• 100% to 120% hydration (e.g. 50g flour to 50-60ml water or 1/3 cup flour to 1/4 cup water) is best for beginning a starter - a batter-like consistency encourages yeasts and bacteria to multiply rapidly.

• Starters need to ‘breathe’ as they grow - have the bowl or jar open to the air while it’s actively culturing, and only put a lid on it when you want to store it.

• 22-24ºC (71-75ºF) is the ideal temperature for beginning a starter. If your room is cooler than this, use warmer water (up to 43ºC/110ºF is fine), and try to keep the jar wrapped up in a blanket or insulated in some other way. You can also snuggle a hot water bottle up next to it. Higher culturing temperatures will make it ferment more rapidly, so you’ll need to feed more frequently if you can’t find a cooler place for it.

• Don’t expect your starter to bake the best quality hearth loaves as soon as it’s bubbly - it can take a couple of weeks of daily feeding to get it strong enough, in the meantime, high hydration pan loaves, pancakes and other discard recipes can be made with great success.

• It’s not ‘cheating’ to start with a piece of someone else’s successful starter, or some purchased dehydrated starter - soon enough it will turn into your starter, with your unique local yeasts, bacteria and flavours, and will be indistinguishable from a starter created by you from scratch.

Hooray, my starters are alive, one started with some lightly fermented milk and artisanal wheat flour, but fed water & flour from then on, the other water-based.
The bread is a little bit on the dense side still, but I'm expecting that to remedy itself with time and warmth.

But. The baked bread comes out of the oven with a very hard crust. I'm looking for a "crunch", yes, but not for a tortoise shell!

I cover the dough with a moist tea towel for raising, but what am I missing? How do I get a thin, crunchy crust?

Hey Nina,
happy to hear you got the starter going!

What bread are you making? And what oven do you use?

I make a german style rye bread (https://permies.com/t/40/66366/vollkornbrot#2435437). It has a hard and thick crust on day 1 and 2, then mellows as moisture travels from the inside into the crust.

Commercial bread ovens often have steam in the oven when the loafs are first put in. Or make a lot of bread at the same time. A dutch oven can recreate that atmosphere somewhat.

Hi Benjamin,

Hmm, maybe the crust will soften then?
I'm baking just plain wheat sourdough bread, very basic, shaping them into spheres.
The oven is a big, electric oven. It's taking quite long for it to heat up, and the bread on the lower rack gets a dark crust on the underside.
Because it's so uneconomical to run, I baked four breads at a time, I think I'll try six next time.
Maybe I should play around with the fan function and add a tray with water on the bottom for steam?
So many factors into bread baking!

Hi Nina,
6 at a time sounds great. Maybe you can upload a photo of the next batch? Would be nice to see.

The fan seems counter intuitive to me, maybe drying the crust out further.

The pan with water might work, but will also take energy to heat up and evaporate.
Do you have a heavy piece of cast iron that could go in the bottom to shield some of the heat, act as a mass and be sprinkled with water after you put the loafs in?

When I started my Sourdough Project I used Chef Johns Sourdough from wild yeast:

https://permies.com/t/97835/Sourdough-Project

I hope you will find this helpful.

If you go with the dutch oven, preheat the pot and lid, put them all in the oven when you begin to heat the oven.  I have baked 6 at a time , when I was selling bread.  Cast iron or romertopf or ceramic crock pot with glass lid.

I always heated the oven to almost 500F, put the dough loaves in their pots,
Then turned it down to 475.  Baked for 30 minutes, then removed the lids and turned the oven down to 435 , and took the bread out after 10 minutes at 435.

Remove from the pan and cool on a rack of some kind.

Kind of a pain with al those pots and lids, but maybe it will give you the crust you want.

Thank you all for your helpful input, I've got variables to play with again - aiming for the 'perfect bread'!
Will post any breakthroughs here

Nina Surya wrote:Hooray, my starters are alive, one started with some lightly fermented milk and artisanal wheat flour, but fed water & flour from then on, the other water-based.
The bread is a little bit on the dense side still, but I'm expecting that to remedy itself with time and warmth.

But. The baked bread comes out of the oven with a very hard crust. I'm looking for a "crunch", yes, but not for a tortoise shell!

I cover the dough with a moist tea towel for raising, but what am I missing? How do I get a thin, crunchy crust?

What temperature are you baking the loaves at? And what size are the loaves?

In general, higher temperatures for less time mean thinner, crispier crusts. 230-245ºC/450-475ºF is good for baguettes and smaller loaves, larger loaves do better at around 220ºC, as higher temperatures can burn the crust before the crumb is cooked through.

To soften up a thick crust, you can cool the loaf wrapped in a tea towel. This won’t make it crispy though, just softer and easier to cut and eat.

Fans are not good for bread. Baking with steam during the first part of baking is a good idea though, whether it’s with water or ice in a separate pan, or by baking the loaf in a dutch oven where it creates its own steam.

Adding more thermal mass to your oven, by putting some tiles or bricks in it will help it to retain heat - when you’re adding lots of bread at once, the oven is cooling down as it adjusts to the influx of cool dough and the opening of the door. By having more thermal mass in the oven, it will help the oven to hold the high temperature for longer. When using thermal mass make sure to give it extra time to fully heat up - the air will heat up and the thermostat will say it's hot before the thermal mass is completely ready.

Another tip is to start your oven off at a higher temperature than what you need, and then reduce the heat once the bread is in the oven, that way, you’re not actually losing any heat that you need when you open the door and add the cold dough, and your bread gets cooked at the higher temperature for less time and then gets a crispier, thinner crust.

Having the dough be quite high in hydration will help encourage a thin crust also - what is the recipe you are using?

Thanks for your helpful input Kate,

I was baking my loaves at 200*C. I did cool the loaves under a teatowel since I've seen my mum do that

Next time I'll try heating up the oven higher than the (higher) baking temperature and adding a steaming element.
If that doesn't give the desired result, I'll try adding thermal mass.

I don't have a recipe but I go by feel, I'm stubborn like that with all the consequences... Mixing the dry ingredients (flour and salt) with a wooden spatula, then adding water and then kneading the dough, adding water or flour if needed with the aim of making a 'bouncy' dough that doesn't stick to the bowl but also definately isn't crumbly.
I'll try aiming at as wet a dough as I can handle next time?

Thanks again!

I thought I'd do an update post on this thread: Thank you all for your helpful advice, we're enjoying delicious sourdoughbread here!

The things I've learned and am doing "right", that help in transitioning from turtleshell stone bread to sourdoughbread heaven are:

- the starter needed to be runnier (= like pancake batter indeed) than mine initially was, and I need to use more of it per baking session. No worries, I'm topping it up in the daily feeding sessions too, now more generously than in the tentative beginnings.

- I was first using baking paper over baking tin and putting the loaves there to 'rise'. Well, they flooded and formed a sad glob. I'm now plopping my dough balls into a pregreased forms. Both forms are glazed earthenware, given a light brushing with some olive oil.

- then a cling film goes on top to keep the moisture in. Initially I was using a wet tea towel, but on the winter-dough-rising-spot aka on the mass of the rocket stove, the teatowel dried during the...

- rising time: depending on temperatures, but 'through the night' seems to be a good average.

- the oven is at 225 degrees Celcius. Before the loaves go in, in their baking forms, I spritz them lightly with water.

- still cooling them under a tea towel.

The sourdough starter has become better - more vigorous and more delicious bread - over time. Et voilá, the result!