Welcome to my chaotic experiment –
Cultivating our sourdough starter
Day 8 (2/13/24) @ 0600 – MAJOR progress!
We were very pleased to see that both our starters had some rise and fall throughout their 24 hour blooms! In order to keep a good thing going, we continued our discards/feeds in the same amount as the day before.
Unfortunately, I mislabeled our jars (which I only noticed as I put together this post). But this was the AM feed of 2/13 with E1 getting 50g feeds and E2 getting 103 gram feeds.
We both went off on our merry way to work and neither of us got back home until about 2030/0830 pm on 2/13. When we entered into our tiny apartment, we KNEW that something really good had happened as the scent of bread filled our entryway. As we turned our corner to the kitchen, we witnessed our starter overflowing from its jar and onto our counter.
I cleaned up the starter mess and headed to bed.
Average House Temp: 72 degrees Fahrenheit
Flour: E1 received 50 g, E2 received 75 g of unbleached bread flour
Water: E1 received 50 g, E2 received 75 g at 100 degrees Fahrenheit
Day 9 (2/14/24) @ 0800 – She’s ready to be baked!
Upon waking the morning of 2/14, my Valentine and I found that our starters had yet again bubbled over after their feed. As it seems our starter is moving towards being more mature, we have decided to start feeding Q12H in order to get her as ready to be baked as she can be. We are hoping to use her this upcoming weekend!
Within only an hour, we started to see a significant rise in E1 and a somewhat smaller rise in E2! Our next feed for these two will be 2/14/24 @ 2000 and will be the same values as below.
Average House Temp: 72 degrees Fahrenheit
Flour: E1 received 50 g, E2 received 60 g of unbleached bread flour
Water: E1 received 50 g, E2 received 60 g at 100 degrees Fahrenheit
Results and Analysis
After MUCH trial and error with this experiment, I am so pleased to say that it worked out in the end! While I have no means of quantifying the amount of yeast/bacteria that have cultivated, I did put some starter in a bowl and it did indeed pass the float test. This test determines if there has been enough CO2 development in the starter in order to make the bread rise enough.
As noted in the microbiology section, the longer starter develops, the better the sour flavors. I do think either E1 or E2 could be used to bake bread soon but we will hold off on use of the starter until this weekend in order to have the best first chance at the bread turning out any good.
I would not have many changes to note if I were to try to cultivate another starter. My biggest alteration to this process would be not switching out jars until the starter was more mature. I do feel that this shift hindered the progress of our starter. I also began to use boiled water on day 7 of the experiment which seemed to improve our growth significantly, I would recommend to begin doing this from the get go. Speaking of water, I was told to not use tap water as the chlorination and mineralization of the water can supposedly hinger yeast growth, but since this type of bread has been around for literally thousands of years and still survived… I figured it’d be just fine.
I am hopeful that this weekend the starters will have continued their upwards trajectory and that they will be good to use. See you then!