"Fred" wrote in message ...

> I gave up on the concept of making a sourdough starter with commercial
> yeast. It needs to be fed constantly.

I'm not sure that you'll find a true sourdough starter any differnet with
respect to feeding. Although I don't feed mine constantly and it does quite
well. I do something along the lines of this:

http://home.att.net/~carlsfriends/dickpics/starter.html


>I mixed some bread flour and some
> tap water into a wet dough and put it a bowl last Friday. On Monday I had
a
> bubbly mass that had grown somewhat in size in the bowl. It had no smell.

I assumme that it had some sort of smell though maybe not a sour smell. I
would not necessarily consider this a negative especially if the starter was
showing activity as you've indicated.

> Also on Monday I started a second culture using organic rye flour and tap
> water that I had boiled and cooled to remove any chlorine. I also added
> some of the rye flour and boiled water to the Friday batch. This evening
> the Friday batch is quite bubbly and smells like aged cheese.

<snip>

> How am I
> doing? Do I have the start of a sourdough starter in the Friday batch?
> What do I do next? Make it larger and try a loaf of bread? Help.

It sounds to me like you've got a couple of starters on their way to being
viable. I'd probably run them through a few daily feedings to get them more
active before I used them.

Every few days there is a welcome message that shows up here in
rec.food.sourdough which has links to a ton of information which might be
helpful.

There are some pretty straight forward recipes he

http://home.att.net/~carlsfriends/OTbrochure.html

-Mike