Starter help needed

i tell you what you doing wrong

you are trying waaaaaaaaay too hard

 cooled ,boiled and airated water

cooled boiled and airated water plus grapes and their juice

not to say this is wrong but you adding so many extra variables and possible contamination sources it is just silly

you might or might not have luck getting your current startes to work ( i have figured that if you refresh often enough you can recover even dead mouse and have it bubble real nice) BUT i would start side project and is super simple

100gr of bakers flour + 100gr of water and for the love of god use just tap water please, mix in glass container cover with sourcer and walk away for a day then toss half of it out and add another 100+100 and so on, within 4-5 days you might find that it starts to bubble fast enough that you don't have to wait whole day for the magic to happen so refresh every 12hours after that.

within a week you should have working starter

if you wish change 100gr of bakers flour with 80/20 or 70/30 as in bakers/rye i find it helps to accelerate proccess fair bit.

OR if you feeling lazy then you are welcome to send me message and you can pop in and grab some really nice and super active starter from me (i'm in melbourne as well)

I used organic flour (rye, whole wheat, unblached white flour, whatever was left in the pantry) and bottled spring water (any cheap brand) at room temperature. Stirred, dumped half the mix, and feed it with fresh water & flour, twice a day (morning and evening). It took 2 days to bubble, then about 1-2 weeks more before the mix was mature and stable. Everything at room temperature, about 20-23°C and it went fine. I used a Mason jar covered with a cloth.

Hugo

In my case, I thought my starter was stabilized at day 10, but then it started bubbling like crazy, it was overactive. A few more days and it stabilized and became as precise as a clock: at 22°C, it slowly rises and peaks after 6 hours.

Here’s why stabilizing a culture takes a few cycles. The initial reaction is performed by yeast present (as spores) in the flour or in the air. However the next steps are performed various bacteria digesting by-products. Here is an example of a digestion chain. Each step is performed by different micro-organisms (yeast, then bacteria):

Starches/glucose --> pyruvate + carbon dioxyde (sharp sour smell)

Pyruvate --> ethanol (aerobic)
Pyruvate --> lactic acid (anaerobic)

Ethanol --> acetaldehyde (green apple smell)
Acetaldehyde --> acetic acid (vinegar)

Of course there are dozens of substances involved and the smell and taste can get very complex due to the complexity of the bacterial flora. For instance, a mature starter using rye can smell like "fresh paint" according to one source.

G'day

I think if you look at my post under 'bread like a brick' this might give you a lot of help and some tips.

Good luck with everything.  If I can be of any further assistance, contact me through this site or through my blog at 

http://handymanchef.wordpress.com

Cheers for now

handymanchef

NO NO NO - I don't believe you should ever use tap water.

As you quite rightly know, tap water contains chlorine and other elements which inhibit the growth of natural yeasts!

It's dead easy, just use bottled water or spring water or water that you know is pure.  Never tap water.  It isn't as if you are going to be using hundreds of litres of the stuff anyway, and a couple of bottles of good still spring water isn't very expensive and will pay dividends in the end.

handymanchef

here is bread made with my clearly badly performing starter, look at this giant crumb holes they must be from all that chlorine in my tap water ;)

here is another link to the pic, hope this one shows, first one still shows here so must be useing my loging to skydrive

for recipies to start i can't recommend enough my fav sourdough vienna white

I would replace all white for 80/20 white/wholemeal and see how that goes for you.

it is under recipe section on this very site.

I agree with Croc as far as Melbourne's water goes. The chlorine in it is not enough to affect SD. I use it; it's all I have ever used. Melbourne's water is incredibly good quality. Nearly all of it comes from closed (no public access) forest catchments and requires nothing more than a little chlorination. In some places the water is much poorer coming from more degraded catchments and so on, and is more heavily chlorine dosed, or dosed with more stable chloramine (not free chlorine), and this might be a problem. (If you have chloramine, boiling won't remove it...). I gather this is more common in other countries, perhaps why some people might (rightly in their location) steer clear of tap water. But not in Melbourne.

Anyway, tank water should be fine, which is presumably what you are using - forget boiling etc for that! (But as well as whatever filter you use, make sure you check for any sediment build-up in your tank - I recently had a water tank desludged and it was pretty ugly in the base.