Ok, I’m a total noob when it comes to cooking / baking.
My parents never really cooked much when I was a kid (both working) so I’m trying to take it up as a hobby. If I ever start a family I’d like to be able to cook.
So anyways - one of my early experiments: Sourdough bread!
I read a bit online about creating your own sourdough starter - basically, what I read was that you make a flour/water mixture and let it sit open to the environment.
I did this. And everything seemed to be going well! My homemade yeast culture was evolving gas bubbles after a few days, and it smelled properly like lactic acid. I poured off the liquid on the top of this culture maybe every other day, and refreshed the thing with fresh flour and water.
When I went to bake - I mixed a bit of the starter in with some fresh flour. Kneaded the dough, it rose properly after a reasonable amount of time.
I baked it, got a nice loaf of bread.
When I tasted the first slice - heavy sour cream taste. Not bad or disgusting, but definitely very…different.
I ended up eating the whole loaf (bad case of bachelor fridge, not much else to eat over a weekend) and I didn’t get sick or anything - but the bread definitely tasted strange. Like I said, like sour cream.
It could be the culture’s age. It’s not supposed to be as good in a week as one you had for a couple years. You may do better buying a sourdough starter yeast and going from there.
It could also be due to your environment. The wild yeasts and bacterium in the air differs from location to location, so sourdough you make in say, Oklahoma would taste different than if you made it in California or…I dunno, Wyoming.
Maybe you just had some really strong, in-your-face punk microorganisms that got together and decided to party like it’s 1999?
Maybe you have just always had store-bought/mass-produced/dumbed-down sourdough before…and not the real thing. There is such a difference between a real, tangy sourdough bread, and what most bakeries/grocery stores pass off as sourdough these days. I think maybe you are just tasting the real thing for the first time.
If it tastes like sour cream, that doesn’t sound to me like it tastes bad. But the wild yeasts found in flour (most of the yeasts you are “catching” are already there, in the flour, they are not from your environment unless you go through the trouble of nuking your flour and killing any microorganisms therein) do have a different taste than commercial sourdough starters.
Frankly, I’ve never been happy with any of my homemade starters, and I’ve tried everything from the plain rye flour + water deal, to mashing in grape skins or organic raisins in with slurry (more yeasts on the skins, plus additional food for the yeast in the form of sugar), to even trying to wake up the wild yeasts from an unfiltered lambic. They all did the job to various degrees, but none were as predictable and clean tasting as the ones I’ve bought online.
Personally, I think it’s one of the coolest web things I’ve ever encountered. Carl was keeping his grandmothers Oregon Trail pioneer sourdough yeast alive. carl passes on to the great bakery in the sky, and his buddies start a website (maybe even pre-internets days) and will send starter for a self address stamped envelope. It’s good too. For a dollar, they will send overseas and that’s a deal.
My Oregon Trail sourdough’s been going for a couple of years now.