A Mad Scientist

It is snowing here.  Ugh.  I have pretty much given up on outside.  Instead, I am holed up in my nice, warm kitchen experimenting with my sourdough starter.  Since creating my own starter from wild yeast a few months ago, I have discovered that there are about a hundred variables to making good sourdough bread.  One of these is to use your starter for baking at exactly the right time.  That is, when the starter is resting at its peak of fermentation.

I found this excellent blog to help guide me.  For my last loaf, I let my starter rise for 8.5 hours before baking with it.  The bread turned out better than my previous tries, but still not great.  I will achieve a light and fluffy bread fulls of holes if it is the last thing I do!  Dramatic and a bit crazy - I know.

Today, I fed my starter at 11:45am with the intention of baking with it around 7:45pm tonight.  By 2:45pm it had doubled.  I read somewhere in my vast amount of research on this, that you should stir the starter a few times during the day to encourage fermentation.  I stirred at 2:45pm and again at 4:45pm.  Each time I stirred it, the starter went back to the 11:45am level.  However, I tried to research further the benefits of stirring the starter during fermentation and when exactly I should be stirring but I could not really find anything more about it.  Weird - maybe this is not actually a thing.  By 7:00pm my starter was still bubbling but it did not look so great.  It was somewhere between the 11:45 and 2:45 markers.

At this point I decided to label "stirring the starter during fermentation" a failed experiment and aborted my plan to bake with this iteration of the starter tonight.  I chucked out a bunch of the starter, fed it, and decided to try the fermentation process again - this time without the stirring.

I plan to check the starter's progress at the 8 hour mark but am considering leaving it until the 10 hour mark too.  I am confident that I will figure out the timing of its peak fermentation point, it might just take me a few (or many) more tries to do it.