"Shmooey" wrote in message
...

I am following a sourdough Chef recipe from Bread Alone, by Daniel
Leader and Judith Blahnik. I can post the specifics if need be- but
it
uses equal parts by weight, flour and water- and a pinch of
commercial
yeast. It does not remove any of the previous batch before feeding
it
again (although i have had to altar this, because i do not own a big
enough container.)

It is on its fourth day and still resembles a wet dough, and doubles
its volume very fast, every time. It smells strongly like wine. The
book says that by now it should be a loose battery-like
consistency...
and this is definitely not the case. Is this bad, or perhapses mine
is just being slow? I am worried that i'm actually not growing a
proper starter, and its just gassy right now.

Also, it gives instructions for turning the chef into your sourdough
starter.... Can someone explain the difference between the two, for
me?

When I started making sourdough "Bread Alone" was the book I was using
as a reference. Daniel Leader uses French terms in the book to refer
to starters, etc. If I recall correctly, and I think I do, chef means
exactly the same thing as starter and the term levain is used when
building that starter to use in making the final dough. I was confused
by the English terms early on myself. Now I just consider everything
starter up until I mix the final dough, but the words used don't
really matter all that much so long as the bread is good.

I never did try his technique of using a pinch of yeast to get a
starter going from scratch. In the book he said that in his bakery
that there was so much yeast in the air that he could just mix flour
and water together and get a starter. I figured I'd give it a try
using just flour and water and it worked. I've since come to believe
that it's not so much the yeast in the air that gets the starter going
as it is the yeast that's in the flour. You starter is probably fine.
I'd give it a few more days if I were you. Sometimes brand new
starters can give you false positives and seem to be rising early on
but then change a bit later. If it's still rising OK after a week or
so you are probably in good shape.

The first recipe I used for sourdough was the recipe in "Bread Alone"
called "Basil's Pain au Levain". Even though I haven't used that
recipe directly for close to ten years, I still think of every batch
of bread I make as a variation on that one recipe. I guess you could
say that its the only recipe I've ever used for sourdough bread, but I
have changed it up quite a bit over the years.

Good luck,
-Mike