miss_thenorth said:
So, can you explain your process of "months" to get your starter making decent loaves, and can explain how you used your starter that were producing so so loaves?
If I am interpreting correctly, you got your starter started, but it wasn't giving you the flavour you wanted? and so, you kept feeding your starter --on the counter or in the fridge?-- and then finally after months, you got decent tasting loaves?
I probably should have written it down at the time, but I will try to reconstruct what I did for you here . . . .
I think it took about a week for my starter to start doubling. At that point I started discarding half with each feeding, but I think I kept it at room temperature and just kept feeding it for at least another week like that before I even tried to use it. Then I think the first thing I tried to make was pancakes and they were an absolute flop, but I suspect that could be because I didn't give them enough time at all to get bubbly (being a sourdough newbie).
I believe at this point though (after 1 week of maintaining it on the counter and after 2 weeks since starting it) I started to keep it in the fridge most of the time and then bring it out to feed it every week. It may have helped if I had kept it on the counter longer. . . .
I started taking the weekly left-overs (after feeding it for two days and only storing a little bit in the fridge for the next week) and attempting to make bread with it. I started with some pretty simple recipes and found that I wasn't having a whole lot of luck . . . the bread tasted sour (more sour than my bread does now) but it wouldn't rise worth a darn. I think for a month or so, I would actually supplement some commercial yeast to get it to rise a little better, but I can't remember for sure that I did, or if I was just tempted to do it. Meanwhile, I was also learning the process of keeping the starter happy on the counter in cooler temperatures. Since a very sour flavor is indicative of the bacteria growing, and since bad rising is indicative of the yeast not growing well, I figured I needed to keep the starter as warm as I could to encourage more yeast growth. (The bacteria and yeast are supposed to be in balance). I often used the oven to keep it optimally warm for the yeast, but I found that had it's drawbacks too . . . often I would mess up and overwarm it and kill it. So for a while there, I had several starters going so I always had a back-up just in case.
After nearly killing it too many times, I decided to just keep it on the counter.
And then I just trudged along like that for a while. I think it was about 2-3 months from when I started it, that I started to get loaves that would rise well and the consistency of my bread baking results started to pick up. I found some other recipes for sourdough bread (basic white sourdough, dark rye, etc.) and was having better luck at this time, so I have since been making those same recipes regularly. I haven't gone back to some of the earlier recipes that I tried . . . maybe I was just too disappointed with them. My guess is the recipes were fine, it was just my starter.
I would guess that 3 months after starting my starter . . . around December . . . my starter was finally up to par. Since then it has actually improved! I am getting some crazy nice loaves of bread now.
That isn't just me either. I gave BBH some of my starter near the beginning and she has noticed the same improvement.
To answer your last question . . . it was the ability to make the bread rise that was making those first loaves so-so. I think I actually preferred the flavor of those first loaves, because they were very sour. But I guess, ultimatel, the texture of the bread outweighs the flavor, IMO. It isn't that my sourdough isn't sour anymore . . . just not intensely so. But to me there is nothing quite like fluffy, melt-in-your-mouth bread.
. Though nobody has come knocking on my door, inquiring about the "white powder" that I had tried to send through the US Postal system, so maybe not. Could be that the envelope was just too bulky to make it through the machines. Anyway, this second lot was better packaged, and I didn't send quite so much. 
