I started a sourdough started 6 days ago and it was very active, rising a lot and tons of bubbles but was eating through it's food too quickly and producing a strong alcohol smell. I read through and reduced the moisture and changed my ratios and it helped and today it produced a perfect "sourdough" smell. I planned to start my first sourdough loaf tonight and when I left in the afternoon it still smelled great but when I got back a few hours later it had shrunk a bit and had an alcohol smell but I went ahead and mixed it up into dough. Now I'm concerned about the safety of it, is that safe to eat?
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Hello anon,
Sounds like you are very lucky to have a very active starter first off. Hopefully you have read the beginners blogs by SourDom that you can acces from the right hand panel of the Home Page on this site. These will help to put your mind to rest.
Basically, one of the by-products of the yeast fermentation is alcohol and generally the smell of that is masked by other 'yeasty' odours. When the yeast activity falls away as the food supply runs down, the 'yeasty' odours decline and the alcohol smell can predominate. Sometimes, early in the development of a starter you can get another by-product that has an acetone-like smell but this mostly only persists for a day or two until the particular bacteria involved no longer finds conditions favourable and dies out.
There is always some carbon dioxide escaping from your starter and, while the rate of production from an actively growing culture exceeds that rate of escape, the effect is to cause the volume to increase (the starter rises). When the activity slows as the food supply runs down, the rate of escape exceeds the rate of production, the rise stops and then the volume will decrease and the sponge will collapse. In actual fact, the rate of escape is not constant but the ultimate effect of balance between escape and production is the same.
So, you seem the have a good active starter that will make you good, safe to eat, bread. Just bear in mind that, depending on your starter activity (very often dependent on the temperature of the room that you are working in or where you store your starter/dough) you might have to adjust the timing of what you do compared to what might be given in a method associated with a recipe or in a general blog. A sourdough is not like commercial yeast that has been purified and selected to give fast, predictable results under a much wider range of conditions (though it can still be controlled by temperature).
Here's hoping your first sourdough based loaf turns out well and you enjoy it and many more. Good luck with your projects.
Farinam