On Tue, 21 Oct 2003 11:13:12 -0500, "Mike Pearce"
wrote:

I've made starters covered, and uncovered, with organic bread flour, rye, KA
bread flour, and most recently Gold Medal AP flour. I've been successful
every time. My conclusion, based on my success rate, isn't that I have some
magical touch it's that making a starter is not that difficult.

My gut feel is that most people who run into problems with starting
starters, as someone else eluded to, is impatience. I think that if you
follow Samartha's instructions, and just continue feeding, eventually you
will end up with a good starter. If you do get antsy that it's not working
just start another one while you continue the feeding schedule on the first.
My guess is that the first will come around before the second.

Here's why I am impatient: Samartha states that the starter should
fermenting in 12 hours and if it hasn't, email him. Unless he just
likes to receive email, he appears to be doing that because he
suspects something is very wrong. Also, nowhere that I can find on his
site or some others like his site is there any mention that the
culture should go for 5 full days without any pronounced activity. In
fact several sites state clearly that if the culture hasn't doubled in
size in 3-5 days, toss it.

It's not that I am so impatient as I am concerned that if I let the
culture go past these recommended time periods that I will end up with
something undesireable. IOW, I am tossing these failed cultures not
out of frustration but out of caution. Nowhere have I seen anyone,
Samartha included, sanction letting a culture sit for 5 days without
noticeable activity.

Maybe the temperature is wrong. It's 75-80F in the kitchen which I
believe is acceptable. I realize I do not want to heat the culture too
hot or I will sterilize it.

I just ordered some sourdough starter from KA - it should get here in
a week. In the meantime I will continue to experiment in the hope that
something clicks. Otherwise when the KA starter comes, I am going to
use it instead of trying to start it naturally.