Hi all – I am new to bread baking, 6 months that’s all. Recently I came back from a long trip and my started had died. Instead of reviving it I’ve decided to purchase a new one (from breadktopia, of course.) I have been feeding him daily for the past two weeks since I got it (twice a day for the first week). It raises up nicely and quickly – double it size in 3 hours, and then by the 6 hours mark fall completely flat. Also, the air bubbles are very small. Also, the smell is much more sour than I remember it was previous batch.
So all of these factors are very different than how my previous starter acted, and I want to try and troubleshoot what’s up (or maybe actually nothing is happening and this is all normal).
Notes: my home is on the colder side, getting to about 72-4, and I use whole rye flour (I read somewhere back then that this is a very forgiving flour for a starter.
There’s a decent chance that your old starter didn’t die. People often think their starter is dead when it looks and smells different from what they are used to after a long period of no feeding. But the yeast and bacteria in the starter can really last a long, long time without feeding and then if you feed them, the culture will re-invigorate pretty quickly. But that info is probably too late.
Anyway… in my experience, rye flour makes everything happen in a starter much faster. Maybe rye is the best or most efficient food for sourdough starter cultures. It peaks faster, gets sour faster, etc.
If you are leaving your rye fed starter out in your kitchen at a room temperature of 72-74 F, then peaking in 3 hours and flat again at 6 hours is definitely in the range of normal, especially if your starter is on the wet side.
You may want to read about starter maintenance in this post here at Breadtopia:
In particular, most people keep their starter in the refrigerator most of the time. This dramatically slows down the microbe’s metabolism (instead of 6 hours to peak and fall, it might be more like 3 days) and stretches out the time needed between feedings, so instead of feeding every day you can feed once a week, or every other week (or if you want to be a heretic like me, maybe once a month or every other month…).