I spent seven days making a starter, bought FWSY, and spent the weekend making my first real bread. I need to speak with the manager.
I spent seven days making a starter, bought FWSY, and spent the weekend making my first real bread. I need to speak with the manager.
by Few_Leather6356
33 Comments
value1024
Manager: “There is a thing called yeast. Use it, burn the book, and shut up.”
TheRunningMD
Sometimes making a starter takes more than 7 days.. Usually the first times using a new starter it isn’t as good because there just aren’t enough yeast in the starter for you to get the best results.
From my experience – For the first 2-3 weeks you make bread with a new starter, add a pinch of regular yeast to the batch. You still get all the flavor but with a boost to the rise.
AdamSilverFox
Most first loaves turn out like yours
rustyamigo
I think you did something wrong 😅
ProfessorChaos5049
A week old starter isn’t going to cut it
Stick with straight doughs using instant yeast until your starter is mature. Or go to a local bakery and see if they can give you some discard.
Also, Ken’s starter / levain method is super wasteful. Go with ThePerfectLoaf or King Arthur’s method. You don’t need to be making 500g or whatever ridiculous amount he was suggesting in that book.
AngElzo
It is more dissapointing when first one comes out close to the one on the cover of the book. But then you start to get frisbees or giant caverns afterwards.
The book is a good start. What I’d suggest is really follow the recipes (bread actually is rather flexible and forgiving but to a point), but about raise volumes not times, as the times vary a lot based on different factors (including room temperature – one of my failures was trying to use the same recipe at 21°C and 28°C) and maybe really give your starter another week (if I recall the book also recommends that)
nutellatime
The pain de campagne recipe in FWSY is a good one to use with an immature starter since it combines the starter with regular yeast.
danarexasaurus
Your mistake was a 7 day old starter. It’s not gonna cut it. Sorry.
Palanki96
first of all, a one week starter is nothing, you need at least 2 weeks to get started properly
if you are not familiar with bread making already don’t start with sourdough. I did the same and it meant skipping all the basic knowledge that was needed for sourdough
onuaxel
At least the crust has correct colour.
RealCoolDad
better starter and work on “oven spring” techniques. good color though!
blueannajoy
My first decent loaf was with a three week old starter, and even that one came out dense. Now I’ve had my baby going for about two years:I can forget it on the counter for a week, give it one refresher and still get a great rise
DMR237
No need to speak with the manager. Just keep at it. Be patient. Be willing to fail.
When I started, it took me 7 loaves over about 4 weeks before I felt like I had cracked the code, despite following all instructions to the letter from the beginning. Then, poof, it all came together and I’ve never looked back.
AnchoviePopcorn
Surprise. You are the manager.
colcardaki
You may want to try a poolish method, which is a starter you make from bakers yeast basically, you just do it a day before. It gives you kind of the “sourdough at home” flavor profile to otherwise regular bread.
Busy_Radish6570
I always do at least two weeks of feeds before using a new starter.
Also, this is probably not as fancy as what’s in the book but Tasty did a decent starter guide to starters and sourdough during the pandemic. That’s how I got jnto breads and it worked pretty great the first time.
I still go back to that version when it’s been awhile.
Hey, please take this advice from someone who also attempted to learn to bake using that as his first guide. Many of his recipes, especially the overnight fermented ones assume Portland temperatures and humidity. Even then, his bulk fermentation times are incredibly long if you bulk ferment for too long, you will get a loaf just like the one you’re showing here. I think the issue is that the bacteria ran out of sugars and started to eat the glutens.
Don’t use the times that he suggests and instead go by the changes in volume. For context, I think he suggests fermenting for like eight hours when I would stop at four, even with similar temperatures.
I’ll say one thing though: all that wasted bread trying to follow his recipes exactly taught me the importance of temperature in rise times. Just a few degrees of difference can add or shave hours of the time needed to ferment. It’s also very nonlinear, meaning that the effect of chaining from 60 to 65° may be far less impactful than changing from 75 to 80°, even though both are 5° intervals.
Deuce-Bags
Fail, get better. Fail, get better. Fail, get better. Fail, get better. Fail, get better. Fail, get better.
maxhinator123
Same thing happened to me, just give the starter 2 more weeks of feeding
CharlesV_
I’d still eat it. Make some soup and toast that bread for dipping. 🙂
1bunchofbananas
You need to spend like a month making a starter before you start making bread and other creations. Trust me. I followed Joshua weissmans starter and he said it would be good after a week and no it’s not
IndyOwl
If it’s any consolation, I had the exact same experience with my first loaf on the exact same book. I’ve set the book aside.
gritoni
Keep experimenting, It gets better!
Cheese_BasedLifeform
Your starter needs to be more mature before you use it. I didn’t even touch mine until it was a few weeks old, and when I did have a younger starter, I looked for recipes that used starter in combo with yeast to help the starter on its way.
pembunuhUpahan
That’s okay. This is everyone. I mean to me at least and even Claire Saffitz. I’d say tartine is a good start tbh and then salt water flour yeast.
I didn’t know how much room temperature plays and turns out….a lot! Humidity too.
I live in Malaysia where it’s humid and hot. So that means you cannot follow the exact recipe and you gotta change some things. If the book says 85°, because of where I’m from, my bulk fermentation would 80° and below. Because of humidity, that means lower hydration because the water in the air, albeit seems small, affects the dough vastly
At first, I thought with the adjustment it’ll be “no way, I think it’s gonna come out bad” and it turned out to be the best way to make sourdough
Then it’s all up to you to experiment with hydration and temperature. Check the air temp and humidity, adjust accordingly. Heck, you wanna get really crazy, get a ph calculator and check the ph level of your dough and use alkali water to gauge ph.
It goes without saying, check your dough with thermometer. At first I was afraid I might puncture the dough during bulk ferment but checking dough with temperature was my key to success
I wish I could try out how if I make sourdough, how it’ll turn out now that I live in slightly higher altitude area, which means the air is colder but I don’t have an oven here.
brandcapet
I love that book, but I don’t personally feel that FSWY is the best at teaching sourdough. The commercially yeasted breads in the first half though are easy, delicious, and – crucially – more consistently repeatable.
Making these doughs first for a few weeks will help teach you techniques and ideas that can then be generalized to sourdough once you get a better feel for how to handle and shape and proof dough in your unique kitchen environment. For me, it helped a lot to practice the basic skills of bread enough and build a little bit of the casual confidence and flexibility that you need to make good sourdough in the constantly changing home kitchen environment.
GrrrArrgh
Your starter is too young. I’m sure it looked fine in your container but that’s a very typical “young starter” problem and look.
ridge_runner56
I cheated on my first tries at sourdough – added my week-old levain strictly for flavor and used yeast for the rise. Pretty much the approach u/TheRunningMD suggests in this thread. The loaves came out really well and gave me the confidence to move forward with sourdough using just my more mature starter.
BTW, FWSY is a great first book. But you really need to pick up his second book, “Evolutions in Bread”, where the author rethinks much of what he wrote in FWSY about building a levain.
MarijadderallMD
Managers going to tell you to come back when your starter is 2-3 months old lol
hbarSquared
Welcome to the hobby! We’ve all made frisbees, it’s a rite of initiation and as a first loaf goes this ain’t half bad.
Baking rewards patience and experience. Bake another, and another, and then bake some more. Before you know it you’ll be turning out masterfully crafted loaves faster than you can eat them.
SnooPies3316
I think Forkish’s best recipes are the poolish and Biga starters. The levain chapters aren’t practical for a home hobbyist imo.
c0ng0pr0
Bread recipes which include fermentation (living components) don’t work like programming code. Results will vary depending on your environment. Temperature, humidity, Ph of stuff, material cleanliness.
33 Comments
Manager: “There is a thing called yeast. Use it, burn the book, and shut up.”
Sometimes making a starter takes more than 7 days..
Usually the first times using a new starter it isn’t as good because there just aren’t enough yeast in the starter for you to get the best results.
From my experience – For the first 2-3 weeks you make bread with a new starter, add a pinch of regular yeast to the batch. You still get all the flavor but with a boost to the rise.
Most first loaves turn out like yours
I think you did something wrong 😅
A week old starter isn’t going to cut it
Stick with straight doughs using instant yeast until your starter is mature. Or go to a local bakery and see if they can give you some discard.
Also, Ken’s starter / levain method is super wasteful. Go with ThePerfectLoaf or King Arthur’s method. You don’t need to be making 500g or whatever ridiculous amount he was suggesting in that book.
It is more dissapointing when first one comes out close to the one on the cover of the book. But then you start to get frisbees or giant caverns afterwards.
The book is a good start. What I’d suggest is really follow the recipes (bread actually is rather flexible and forgiving but to a point), but about raise volumes not times, as the times vary a lot based on different factors (including room temperature – one of my failures was trying to use the same recipe at 21°C and 28°C) and maybe really give your starter another week (if I recall the book also recommends that)
The pain de campagne recipe in FWSY is a good one to use with an immature starter since it combines the starter with regular yeast.
Your mistake was a 7 day old starter. It’s not gonna cut it. Sorry.
first of all, a one week starter is nothing, you need at least 2 weeks to get started properly
if you are not familiar with bread making already don’t start with sourdough. I did the same and it meant skipping all the basic knowledge that was needed for sourdough
At least the crust has correct colour.
better starter and work on “oven spring” techniques. good color though!
My first decent loaf was with a three week old starter, and even that one came out dense. Now I’ve had my baby going for about two years:I can forget it on the counter for a week, give it one refresher and still get a great rise
No need to speak with the manager. Just keep at it. Be patient. Be willing to fail.
When I started, it took me 7 loaves over about 4 weeks before I felt like I had cracked the code, despite following all instructions to the letter from the beginning. Then, poof, it all came together and I’ve never looked back.
Surprise. You are the manager.
You may want to try a poolish method, which is a starter you make from bakers yeast basically, you just do it a day before. It gives you kind of the “sourdough at home” flavor profile to otherwise regular bread.
I always do at least two weeks of feeds before using a new starter.
Also, this is probably not as fancy as what’s in the book but Tasty did a decent starter guide to starters and sourdough during the pandemic. That’s how I got jnto breads and it worked pretty great the first time.
I still go back to that version when it’s been awhile.
Starter: https://youtu.be/kbw7lDO_kuY?si=8w0di9fbU1Ovi7zE
Sourdough bread: https://youtu.be/rkoLmraD79A?si=8LcVzP8WVAOmazSS
r/expectationsvsreality
Hey, please take this advice from someone who also attempted to learn to bake using that as his first guide. Many of his recipes, especially the overnight fermented ones assume Portland temperatures and humidity. Even then, his bulk fermentation times are incredibly long if you bulk ferment for too long, you will get a loaf just like the one you’re showing here. I think the issue is that the bacteria ran out of sugars and started to eat the glutens.
Don’t use the times that he suggests and instead go by the changes in volume. For context, I think he suggests fermenting for like eight hours when I would stop at four, even with similar temperatures.
I’ll say one thing though: all that wasted bread trying to follow his recipes exactly taught me the importance of temperature in rise times. Just a few degrees of difference can add or shave hours of the time needed to ferment. It’s also very nonlinear, meaning that the effect of chaining from 60 to 65° may be far less impactful than changing from 75 to 80°, even though both are 5° intervals.
Fail, get better. Fail, get better. Fail, get better. Fail, get better. Fail, get better. Fail, get better.
Same thing happened to me, just give the starter 2 more weeks of feeding
I’d still eat it. Make some soup and toast that bread for dipping. 🙂
You need to spend like a month making a starter before you start making bread and other creations. Trust me. I followed Joshua weissmans starter and he said it would be good after a week and no it’s not
If it’s any consolation, I had the exact same experience with my first loaf on the exact same book. I’ve set the book aside.
Keep experimenting, It gets better!
Your starter needs to be more mature before you use it. I didn’t even touch mine until it was a few weeks old, and when I did have a younger starter, I looked for recipes that used starter in combo with yeast to help the starter on its way.
That’s okay. This is everyone. I mean to me at least and even Claire Saffitz. I’d say tartine is a good start tbh and then salt water flour yeast.
I didn’t know how much room temperature plays and turns out….a lot! Humidity too.
I live in Malaysia where it’s humid and hot. So that means you cannot follow the exact recipe and you gotta change some things. If the book says 85°, because of where I’m from, my bulk fermentation would 80° and below. Because of humidity, that means lower hydration because the water in the air, albeit seems small, affects the dough vastly
At first, I thought with the adjustment it’ll be “no way, I think it’s gonna come out bad” and it turned out to be the best way to make sourdough
Then it’s all up to you to experiment with hydration and temperature. Check the air temp and humidity, adjust accordingly. Heck, you wanna get really crazy, get a ph calculator and check the ph level of your dough and use alkali water to gauge ph.
It goes without saying, check your dough with thermometer. At first I was afraid I might puncture the dough during bulk ferment but checking dough with temperature was my key to success
I wish I could try out how if I make sourdough, how it’ll turn out now that I live in slightly higher altitude area, which means the air is colder but I don’t have an oven here.
I love that book, but I don’t personally feel that FSWY is the best at teaching sourdough. The commercially yeasted breads in the first half though are easy, delicious, and – crucially – more consistently repeatable.
Making these doughs first for a few weeks will help teach you techniques and ideas that can then be generalized to sourdough once you get a better feel for how to handle and shape and proof dough in your unique kitchen environment. For me, it helped a lot to practice the basic skills of bread enough and build a little bit of the casual confidence and flexibility that you need to make good sourdough in the constantly changing home kitchen environment.
Your starter is too young. I’m sure it looked fine in your container but that’s a very typical “young starter” problem and look.
I cheated on my first tries at sourdough – added my week-old levain strictly for flavor and used yeast for the rise. Pretty much the approach u/TheRunningMD suggests in this thread. The loaves came out really well and gave me the confidence to move forward with sourdough using just my more mature starter.
BTW, FWSY is a great first book. But you really need to pick up his second book, “Evolutions in Bread”, where the author rethinks much of what he wrote in FWSY about building a levain.
Managers going to tell you to come back when your starter is 2-3 months old lol
Welcome to the hobby! We’ve all made frisbees, it’s a rite of initiation and as a first loaf goes this ain’t half bad.
Baking rewards patience and experience. Bake another, and another, and then bake some more. Before you know it you’ll be turning out masterfully crafted loaves faster than you can eat them.
I think Forkish’s best recipes are the poolish and Biga starters. The levain chapters aren’t practical for a home hobbyist imo.
Bread recipes which include fermentation (living components) don’t work like programming code. Results will vary depending on your environment. Temperature, humidity, Ph of stuff, material cleanliness.