Having a crack at sourdough, I’ve got my starter fermenting away merrily.

Anyone else intruiged by the magic that is sourdough?

yes 🙂

anyone here make sourdough?

Tried it, didn’t really do it for me. I prefer making and eating basic bread.

Yes. It’s Ace. I had to stop though as I was eating a lot of bread. Works best if your starter is always active. One proving, one baking, one eating.

I’ll just leave this here. All are well tasty.

https://www.theperfectloaf.com/my-top-3-leftover-sourdough-starter-recipes/

I gave up as I was becoming a slave to it. Sourdough hotels while you go on holiday ffs.

Tend to use the sponge methods now where you make a starter with yeast the night before and mix the next day, A delayed final proving in the fridge overnight then bake the next day.

The tyranny of baking – nothing like the taste of descent bread though.

I just feed mine once a week, then put it back in the fridge. Easy. I’ve also frozen some just in case.

mine lives in the fridge and i very rarely feed it., perhaps once a month. still going strong after 3 years

Never tried it but intrigued when it popped up on th’news the other day – I shall investigate the links on here, ta. 🙂

63 year old starter here from Tom Herbertt. Been cut with a couple of others too, notably Bertha’s in Bristol. Go through periods of high activity, but quite often left for month than a month between feeds. Lives in the fridge. I’ve recently been trying to make wetter doughs.

my daughter makes much tastier bread than my wife, I suspect it is because my daughter is less obsessive about hand washing.

Making a couple of loaves of rye/white once a week. It’s really simple and keeps well. And quite good fun.

And is slowly amortising the £160 I paid* to go on a course to learn how to do it.

*Drunk supporting of bakery crowd funding schemes. “You’ve spent £160 on four loaves of bread? WTF”

Cool. I’ve got a simple 50/50 flour water starter going, it’s bubbling nicely. I love the taste of sourdough over standard bread

I like the Herberts but isn’t using an old starter just a bit of a gimmick?

FWIW I’ve made a starter but haven’t found a simple  enough recipe to make my loaf yet 😂

Yes we have a sourdough thread I think. Just started to move towards more wholemeal breads and they are coming out great. Also doing pittas now.

Tasty recipe here and useful if you run out of yeast.

https://www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-love/news/a49894/yeast-infection-sourdough-bread/

I make lots of the lovely stuff. Too easy to eat though, so most of mine is for sale. Reading recipes was bewildering, but after a day course it all became clear !

Just made four to prove tonight, the kitchen will smell lovely in the morning

Thanks for that geetee, I’ll get to scraping behind my helmet

I love sourdough, but had little luck with the starter. It bubbled away at first, but fairly quickly seemed to go into the ‘formaldehyde’ stage. I wasn’t sure what I’d done wrong, and wondered about buying some starter from etsy or wherever as an easier approach.

Thoughts/ advice?

I was told that the bad smelling stage is common when beginning a starter as there is a point when bacterial growth exceeds the rate of yeast growth, until the yeast reaches a point where it makes the environment too acidic for most bacteria to reproduce, whereby the yeasts take over.