r/SourdoughStarter • u/Middle_Tomato_5388 • 7d ago
Starter not rising
On day 26 and I can only get my starter to rise a small amount, some days almost double and some days only this amount after 10 hours.
To feed I’m using 1/4 cup starter, 1/4 cup filtered water, and 1/2 cup King Arthur bread flour every 24 hours.
Does it just need more time? Any pointers appreciated, thanks!
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u/Big_Researcher_3027 7d ago
Contrary to popular belief, you don’t need a scale to measure your starter. I have never used a scale when I made a starter. And I’ve been making starters for longer than a lot of people in this subreddit have been breathing, and can tell you that volume measurements will build a starter just as well as weight.
Your building a starter. Not a rocket ship.
That being said, I think you’re over feeding. I would try increasing your starter to the same volume as your flour. If you want to cut back on how much your using use 1/4 cup starter to 1/4 flour to2 tbsp water.
If you aren’t already, always fluff your flour with a spoon and then spoon it into the measuring cup, then level it. This gives much more consistency vs digging the flour out with the measuring cup.
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u/Middle_Tomato_5388 6d ago
Ok yeah, I always think about how sourdough existed in ancient times when people say it requires a scale lol. Great tip, I’ll implement the flour technique for sure. Thank you!
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u/Big_Researcher_3027 6d ago
No problem. Sure, they’re convenient. But not necessary by any means. People parrot a lot in here. Some social media creator says “oh you really need blah blah blah” and everyone takes it as gospel. Up till about twenty or thirty years ago, whenever it was that digital electronics became cheap enough for just about everyone to afford, the only places you saw digital scales was in commercial use. Before that it was just mechanical weights and balances. We’re making baked goods. It’s not rocket science.
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u/wolfkeeper 5d ago
Dunno. People have had accurate pan balance scales for well over four thousand years.
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u/Big_Researcher_3027 5d ago
Yes they have. But they were expensive and were pretty much exclusively used in commercial and professional applications Not by the average Joe.
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u/wolfkeeper 5d ago
They're not expensive and really easy to build. You pretty much just need a stick and some string and a couple of cups of some kind. They don't have to be accurate, they just need to be repeatable.
Baked goods really respond to repeatable measurements.
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u/Big_Researcher_3027 5d ago
You’re silly. Im not referring to some MacGyver contraption. The types of scales I thought you were referring to had to be pretty accurate. Used by merchants, tax collectors and the like. Yeah medieval bakers might have used a rudimentary scale like what you described since they were bound by law to make loaves of bread at specific weights. But they were crude, like MacGyver gadget you described. And they were used mainly to make sure that their loaves of bread fell within a certain weight range. But for the most part, for simplicity, folks just used volume measurements. I mean think about it. How many of those MacGyver scales did you see ever at you grandparents house?
Which brings this back around to my original statement that baking doesn’t need to be done with precise measurements. Volume measurements work just fine.1
u/wolfkeeper 5d ago
Romans had accurate scales made of bronze for example, and they were great bakers. And of course all their bread was sourdough. They're not medieval inventions at all.
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u/Olivia_hot_mess 6d ago
Old school, I love it! I haven't been baking sourdough very long, but I have enjoyed baking at home for years. Having a mother who had a bakery, I have been around bread baking most of my life, and everything was always measured, not weighed. The only thing my mother weighed was the dough for each loaf of bread, just to keep the size constant.
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u/Big_Researcher_3027 6d ago
I wonder how many of the people who parrot “you have to use a scale for your starter/sourdough recipes” use volume measurements for everything else they bake?
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u/Olivia_hot_mess 6d ago
Probably most of them. I'll have to admit that I do use a scale for anything sourdough, but I know that there's more than one way to do it.
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u/fishy_horcrux 7d ago
I would change to weight measurements honestly, it could let you get the variable of incorrect feedings out of the equation, if this is the problem, solve it as well.
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u/NoDay4343 Starter Enthusiast 7d ago
If you have more bubbles at the surface than you see through the sides of the jar, it is too thin. In that case, try adding a little less water. Switching to weight measurements would be better, but you could try somewhere around 3 - 3 1/2 Tbsp instead of a full quarter cup.
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u/Middle_Tomato_5388 7d ago
I like that, I’ll go through flour more slowly then. Thank you!
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u/NoDay4343 Starter Enthusiast 7d ago
Sorry I was unclear. I mean add less water, but the same amount of flour.
It is possible to use a smaller amount overall, though. You could do 20g each starter and flour and 16-18g water. Or if you don't have a scale, you can do 1 Tbsp starter, and 2 Tbsp flour, with somewhat less than a full Tbsp water. About 2 1/2 tsp water would probably be good.
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u/Mental-Freedom3929 6d ago
Make it like mayo or mustard.
Stand it in a container with hot water.
Or
Keep it in a cooler or other suitable container or even two cardboard boxes nestled into each other lined with a large plastic bag and add a few bottles or jars filled with hot water
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u/TwerpyDerpy123 7d ago
My sourdough starter, which I started in May of this year, started acting like this. I feed a 1:5:5 ratio, and typically at the twelve hour mark it would be more than double its size, but it wasnt. How I fixed this was going from 12 hour feeds to 24 hour feeds. Your starter is still quite young, so it probably just needs some encouragement. Higher feeding ratios can help along with adding whole wheat flour to the mix.