Sourdough experiment continues

I have been feeding my starter for a couple of weeks and reading websites on the subject. I have discovered that it takes about 3 weeks to really develope a good starter feeding it twice a day. I have to make a trip to care for my mom after her knee surgery so I won't be around to baby my current starter. I will try and bake bread with it one more time before I leave just to see if the bread has a less bitter flavor since I stopped feeding it with rye (which may have been rancid to start hence the bitter flavor) and started feeding it with unbleached, white, all-purpose flour.
I have read on several websites that a growing starter needs to be feed twice a day for 3 weeks. Each feeding consists of 1/4 c water and 3/8ths cup of wheat flour, then add about a cup of the growing starter discarding the remainder. I cover mine with cheese cloth but one web site used plastic wrap. Check out this website, I really liked it. It is gnowfglins.com. It is a teaching website and asks people who use it to pay what they can afford to send. I think it is worth using. The site has excellent videos demonstrating the process of starting a starter.

First sourdough loaves

The loaves of bread made on Sunday rose beautifully. The flavor however was not so great. The bread had a sour flavor, but also a bitter aftertaste. I was using rye flour that I had in the freezer and maybe it was rancid. Rye flour will go bad faster than white flour. I have decided to continue to feed the starter for another week with unbleached white flour and see if the bitter taste goes away. If it doesn't improve I may start the culture over with fresher flour. My son Tom and I are the only people in the family who ate the bread. It didn't bother Tom, although he thought it tasted weird. On the other hand, I had some digestive issues that might be related to the starter since I ate some of the bread warm and I know that yeast will stay active in bread for a day.

Mixing and Baking sourdough bread

It is now Sunday afternoon. This morning I removed the flour, water, starter mixture from the basement and set it upstairs in the kitchen to warm up a bit. At 10 a.m. I added 2 tsp. Real Salt, 1/3 Cup melted butter and 1/4 cup of honey to my Bosch Universal mixer and poured the starter mixture in with it. After adding one cup of whole grain, white, winter wheat flour to the bowl, just to create some friction, I turned on the mixer and set the timer for 10 minutes. For the first couple minutes I added additional flour until the dough cleaned the sides of the bowl and then I just let the Bosch do my kneading. After 10 minutes I turned off the machine and left for church not knowing how risen the dough would be when I got home.

Once home I wet my pointer finger and poked the dough. The dough sighed and collapsed a bit. Darn! Over Risen. Don't know now if it will rise properly in my bread pans but I am preheating the oven and the shaped dough is covered with a damp towel and rising in the pans. Only time will tell. Will it even taste good? Smelled pretty bad. I read on one sourdough website called Sourdough Home, that the good bacteria eventually overwhelms the bad bacteria and the starter will improve over time. It also recommended using processed white flour to feed the starter because the yeast in the starter comes in part from the grains themselves. By using dead white flour you are not introducing any new varieties of yeast that might compromise the starter. Not sure I really care at this point because I don't have enough experience to know what is good or bad in a starter.

I am going to bake this bread in the same way that I bake my Honey Wheat bread as far as timing and temperature goes. Keeping my fingers crossed.

Sourdough Starter

I have been fermenting freshly ground rye flour in water for a week now in a cheese cloth covered bowl. I started with a 1 Cup of rye and a 1 cup of water that I let sit out on the counter over night so the chlorine could gas off. The recipe called for filtered water, but this is what I have available. Everyday for a week now I removed 1/2 cup of starter and then fed the remaining mixer 1/2 cup of rye and 1/2 cup of water. If the bowl looked crusty I transferred the mixture to a fresh glass bowl. The starter is now bubbly, smelly, sour and somewhat bitter tasting. Ready to try making bread now. Tonight I will add 1/2 cup of starter to 4 cups of wheat flour and 2 cups of water. I want it to ferment nice and slow so I am going to put it in the basement closet where the temperature is about 63 degrees F right now. In the morning I plan to add the remaining ingredients and let ferment upstairs while we are at church. We will see what kind of science experiment we come home to after church. I will publish the process when I have achieved success!