My recent failures with sourdough have me pretty upset, and I’ve been pondering what might be the cause. My theory is that my starter isn’t as active as it needs to be. To test this I did a feeding on Thanksgiving, while I was doing all my other baking, and I monitored it’s...

My friend Jason had some sourdough starter in his fridge that he uses for pizza, so I tried to use it to make a couple loaves of sourdough using the Tartine recipe. I fed a bit of his starter the night before, but it failed to really come to life by the next morning. I had a lot of other...

No new loaves for awhile because I was traveling in Europe. I didn’t ask my wife to feed my starter for me while I was gone, and I left with it already a week old. So this is what starter looks like after three weeks in the refrigerator: It’s very ugly. BUT, the odor was not so...

I’ve only had marginal success making sourdough bread from a starter. My first attempts were with a homegrown starter that never worked (loaves 15 and 18). We made great bread at my SFBI sourdough class, but I only had moderate success with sourdough I made at home with their starter...

After my sourdough bread failure made with my starter (Loaf 15), I’ve hypothesized that my starter had gone stagnant. I restarted it by taking a portion of the mother starter and feeding it with flour and water. It’s living in the fridge now, but after a day of living on the...

This weekend I tried to make sourdough bread with the home grown sourdough starter I made. It failed. The final dough never rose, so I suspect the mother starter had lost its power. Step by Step Following the directions in Reinhart’s “Artisan Breads Every Day,” on Saturday...

The “Just South of San Francisco Sourdough” starter has been moving along. For Phase 3 I fed it and moved it into a measuring cup so I could more accurately tell how much it had grown. What started as 3/4 cup grew overnight to 1 3/4 cup. It was right on schedule, so the next step...

My “Just South of San Francisco Sourdough” starter is about four days old now. I took it to stage 2 a couple days ago by feeding it more flour and water. It hadn’t changed significantly in that time, but it’s starting to show some action now. There are signs of foaming...