As painful as it is to write this, I need to say that everyone should completely ignore anything I have written about starting from scratch your own sourdough starter. Unless of course it is your goal to fail.

As many people before, I saw extreme activity in my culture during the first day, bubbles smell and the culture even more the doubled overnight. Then during 2nd, 3nd, 4th and 5th day i barely detected any activity in my starter. Just before feeding I saw some bubbles, but it all disappeared right after feeding my starter. So as any frustrated bread maker would do, I turned to the internet for answers…. Turns, out if there is not enough acidity in the starter, the “bad guys” grow in your culture preventing the good ones from taking off. In fact there is one recipe that allows you to bypass one of the steps in making starter by raising acidity from the get-go disallowing the “bad guys” to grow in your culture. It took me just one feeding where I substituted water with pineapple juice for my starter to really take off.

The Pineapple Juice Solution For Sourdough Starter

I am certain now that if I ever need to make a new starter again, I will follow the recipe I found at Breadtopia.com (see the video to the right). All previous recipes I tried to follow called for water and flour- this mixture is not acidic enough allowing some other bacterias to grow whose behavior can be mistaken for actual wild yest by an inexperienced bread bakers. The sourdough starter recipe I found at Breadtopia.com allows you to completely bypass the step where the “not-so-good” bacteria dominate in your stater. By the way, I highly recommend to subscribe to Breadtopia.com to stay on top of Eric’s (the site founder) newest videos on bread making. At Breadtopia.com you can also purchase number of outstanding products you might need on your sourdough baking adventure.