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Hi
I am super excited to try this.
But I was wondering if you have tried to convert a wheat sourdough starter to brown rice starter? I have some starter that I can revive and try to transfer.
Thanks.
My experience when turning a gluten starter into gluten free especially with brown rice flour is that it can be done but the first feed kind of shocks it. My starter can be fed any flour and it happily bubbles up. For some reason when it comes to brown rice flour it doesn’t like it. So normally theres a lull after the first feed of about 24 - 36 hours and then it bubbles up after which it’s fine and reacts very well. Trick is just to wait after the first feed and don’t be tempted to try to wake it up by feeding again until it’s had time to adjust. Then again everyones starter is different and yours might not react the same way.
Help! I have a family member, Charlie, that is Celiac. When he last visited he told me about an experience eating bread he could not believe was gluten free in Italy years ago. I thought i would attempt to make a bread that might be better than what is found in stores. Here is the issue-i have fed the starter for the fourth time this am using rice flour. It smells TERRIBLE. It isn’t moldy and yesterday it did rise and fall. The glass jar was thoroughly cleaned before i began. For what it is worth, I make traditional sour dough bread frequently. I would appreciate any thoughts. Thank you.
Not an answer to the problem per se but why not make a fruit yeast water with raisins? You can either keep it going and use it for gluten free preferments or use it to inoculate a gluten free starter and keep it going. While yeast water is not sourdough if you keep the starter going for long enough and maintain it like a sourdough eventually it’ll turn into one and you can still use it to bake in the meantime.
I think you may have to get past an initial feet/cheese smelling bacteria stage to the lactobacillus bacteria. In warmer months, this seems more common.
Try adding an acid like pineapple juice or lemon juice with your next feed for part of the water. I recently spoke with someone who had success following Breadtopia’s “how-to make starter” instructions just with GF flour instead of all purpose wheat flour. Pineapple juice is used in the recipe to lower the pH of the starter.
Hello! I just found this recipe and am excited to try it for my sister’s family who are GF eaters. I have a mill and would grind the brown rice- does it matter which type is used? There is long grain, short grain, basmati- does it matter?
Thanks for the help!
Lezlee
Those all sound fine. I would avoid parboiled rice because that’s on the no-no list for home mills, but that’s about the only restriction I can think of.
Good luck with your gluten free baking!
Im on day 14 building the NG starter and changed the feed mix to 50/50 brown rice flour/Breadtopia NG flour a few days ago. I’ve been getting good doubling with bubbling all along but the consistency of the starter is like a light weight play-do (ie very stiff)?
It is just such a different consistency vs my usual whole wheat starter, that I wondered if this is normal for the NG starter to be so stiff?
Thanks all!
Stiff and spongy is fine. The GF bread flour behaves that way and brown rice flour can be fairly absorbent. You can use more water in your feed ratio if you prefer a consistency that’s easier to mix. Congrats on the bubbly doubling!
To begin a gluten free sourdough starter, I use equal parts gluten free flour and water by weight.
New member, new-ish sourdough baker. Sorry if this has been asked, I didn’t see the topic in my brief perusal of the topics:
How easy is it to make regular sourdough bread from gluten-free sourdough starter? I only make sourdough occasionally, so it seems redundant to maintain 2 starters. I was planning to try to build a GF starter to make some GF bread for a relative, and if that works for regular sourdough, I’d just maintain that one.
My thought would be to build a regular starter from 3 feedings 12 hours apart, using AP flour and the GF starter.
But as it will take at least a couple or more weeks to build that GF starter, I thought I’d check first to see if there already was a good technique out there.
Thanks
I haven’t done this exactly but I can’t imagine there would be a problem. Switching the food on a starter is fine. All you need is for the flour to have a decent amount of starch/sugar. Actually now that I think about it, I did something similar recently. I fed all purpose flour starter with chickpea flour and then used that in a not-chickpea dough.
Moreover, traditionally this bread is made with a from-scratch chickpea ferment.
Switching up the food in a starter can work like a charm. Totally agree, as long as the flour has good starch/sugar, you’re set. I actually experimented too—fed my all-purpose flour starter with chickpea flour and used it in a non-chickpea dough. Turned out pretty great!
It’s neat how traditionally, this bread uses a chickpea ferment from scratch. It’s all about that delicious twist!
By the way, if you’re into exploring different flours, I stumbled upon some fantastic options at a natural foods company. They’ve got a wide range of quality stuff that might elevate your experiments.
Hello!!
Buckwheat is very easy to ferment. I’m curious as to what is going wrong. What has been your method so far?
BTW have you tried naturally fermented buckwheat bread which doesn’t need a starter? You can do this method for buckwheat or buckwheat with some other grains mixed in as well. It’s easy to do and no need to keep a starter. Of course it would be handy to have a starter but you can make other types of gluten free sourdough breads in the meantime.
I am almost thinking it’s not in a warm enough environment. So I started to put it in the oven today with the light on.
I didn’t know about the other process. How can I learn more about it?
