Misadventures in Sourdough

To say sourdough is my arch nemesis might be an overstatement buuuuuuuut probably not. I have tried numerous times to master the sourdough starter. Most people make it seem like sourdough is so easy and at first I got really frustrated with myself because I could not figure out what I was doing wrong. Turns out it probably wasn’t anything I was doing. My climate works against me where sourdough is concerned. Because it is hot and humid the natural bacteria in the sourdough is more active. So my starter needs to be fed more often than most.

(It started out strong)

After almost 2 years without an oven I decided to try sourdough once more. I’ve started sourdough at least 3 times previous to this and it never goes well. Usually I encounter mold problems or just an inactive starter. This time I came across a peculiar phenomenon. I went to feed it one day and it smelled like nail polish remover. I don’t mean it smelled sort of chemically, I mean it smelled like straight acetone. I was completely freaked out. I had used rubbing alcohol in the kitchen earlier that day and was supremely concerned I had somehow gotten it on my wooden spoon which I later used to stir the starter. Thankfully this was not the case and after some googling I found the problem. Apparently this happens when the lactic acid bacteria produces a ton of acetic acid which can turn into acetone. The article I read said it isn’t dangerous and that when you feed it the smell will go away. It also mentioned that reducing the water content will help prevent acetic acid build up. So I did just that. I added more flour, less water kind of haphazardly (whenever I felt like it didn’t need water, I know that’s not very exact). I also started feeding it twice a day. From the very beginning I was using smaller amounts. Usually a sourdough starter recipe tells you to add one cup of flour and one cup of filtered water once a day. I started out adding only a quarter of a cup. This is because, being only two people we don’t need much bread. A cup a day would have been a waste of flour. I increased that to a quarter cup twice a day and it seems to have really helped. My next step will be figuring out how to store it in the fridge and make sure I still feed it once a week. In case you hadn’t noticed I have a really hard time remembering to feed this thing!

(I left it in the oven with the light on, covered with a wet piece of cheesecloth overnight. It got a little crust on it)

Now that’s just the starter! I also have problems with making the bread itself. Up until this current experiment I was trying to bake a pseudo sourdough. This is where you add some yeast to the bread dough with your cup of sourdough starter. This never ended up well. I could not get the bread to rise the way the recipe said it should and always ended up with an extremely dense loaf of bread. It was horrible. This time I decided I was going to go for it, create a true sourdough loaf. So I found a new recipe and got started. From the very beginning I was skeptical. To me the dough seemed too soft (though the recipe said it should be) I kept thinking of the videos I had seen where the dough could be shaped into a ball without trouble. But I kept going, following the recipe. I left it to rise for 4-12 hours. Even after 7 hours it still had not doubled in size. I was forced to leave it to rise overnight. The next morning I baked it. It still had not doubled in size but I did it anyway.