Sourdough 3

RIP Sourdough 3.

My starter appears to have stopped.......

I'll have to buy some more rye flour today and start all over again.

Sourdough 3 - part c

My attempt to revive my starter failed.....it bubbled a bit which seemed to be a reasonable amount after the first feeding after over a month in the fridge, but after the second feeding it did nothing at all. By yesterday afternoon it had developed a layer of hooch about half a centimeter from the top which looked rather sinister. I was thinking about what I'd done differently this time and came up with four factors. First and I suspect most importantly was that I used warm tap water instead of heating up bottled water, second, I heated it by 'eye' not by thermometer, thirdly, it's a lot hotter now than it was for Sourdough Two, and finally and I'm sure insignificantly, I kept the 'refreshed' starter in the kitchen rather than above my desk.

This morning, I've (hopefully) revived it again by doing the following:

• Discarding a good proportion of the inactive goo, including everything above and including the mysterious floating layer of hooch.
• Transferring half a cup of clean starter to a clean bowl.
• Giving it a damn good beating with a wire whisk.
• Heating one cup of bottled water to 40degrees.
• Adding water and one cup of organic white bread flour (I've run out of rye) to the bowl.
• Thoroughly mixing starter, water and flour until it looked lovely and smooth and smelled really quite nice.
• Poured into a clean plastic tub, level marked (thank you again Mr Postman), lid attached and placed on my lucky shelf above my desk.

Now I wait and in 12 hours do the following - without discarding any starter add two cups of water and two cups of flour (inconveniently twelve hours will be at around 23.00 tonight when I'll be in bed, so I may do it at about 9pm which is a more sociable time if I'm working in 12 hour shifts). This sounds like a lot of flour to me, I think I may have added too much this morning. I'll try and remember to start off smaller next time!

Sourdough 3.

It's sourdough time again!

I rather hesitantly opened my abandoned starter's tub to find a layer of hooch which had gone slightly opaque and filmy on the top, but once I'd poured that away, the remaining starter smelled great, so it's had a nice time in my fridge and has been keeping itself healthy which is nice to know.

I poured it into a bowl and gave it a bit of a whisk to get it moving and introduce some air and them added the starter's volume in rye flour and warm water (tap water this time, there was no bottle at home) and whisked it up and poured into it's tall plastic tub with a lid. I've marked the level with a red rubber band (thank you again, Mr Postman) and I'll see what happens. It's much warmer weather now, with the temperature at 27 above my desk.

I want to try the no-knead method this time where it gets cooked in a lidded pot, a friend has raved about this technique (for regular bread though, not sourdough) so I think I'll have to do a bit of research online as there's no mention of this method in my books.