Hi from New Zealand 🇳🇿!
I had been a user of sourdough starter provided by a baker friend, and kept it going quite happily for a good couple of years before having to give it up.
As we are all in the midst of the pandemic, and the ensuing craziness around food security (yes, supermarkets here are under serious strain too - who knew when the chips were down that our nation would become flour obsessed?!), i procured what flour I could and, as the awesome King Arthur Flour was a favourite recipe site when I did have a sourdough starter, I decided to try out the starter ‘creation’ recipe after using my friends recipe resulted in disaster.
So. I am about two weeks in, and toughing it out. What I am confident I have right, is the weight and temperature conversions, and feeding routines. What I am having issues with are similar to the posts I’ve read around lack of rise, no overt sour smell, and very little in terms of bubbles. After reading through several posts that addressed my particular problems, I’m guessing that a change in feeding routine, back to once a day and re-injecting the ‘whole’ flour to increase acidity, is what I need to do. My questions are really around two things: 1) Are the flour types I have okay, and 2) What can I do to fix my problems with tempurature?
I have a stock of Rye flour, and Spelt flour, from my local organic store bulk bins, and also a good stock of a premium while bakers flour (that I have added wheat gluten to so it has a 15% protein content for bead making). I have been using the bakers flour since the move to twice a day feedings, and I started out with the Rue flour. So...is the Rye a good flour to use for the feeding routine you’ve described for injecting that needed yeast/acidity, or would the Spelt be better, and is the bakers flour okay to use when I revert back to 2x daily feedings?
Lastly, my biggest issue...weather. Temperature. More specifically, lack of it - and lack of particular devices that could help. As we are in the lowest part of the Southern Hemisphere (my family and I live in the Otago region of the South Island which is really cold in winter. And, as luck would have it, we are having unseasonably cold winter weather in our ‘autumn’ season. With two kids in lockdown at home, hubby working from home, a small house, and grotty weather...yep, we are living the life, hahaha 😉🙄) it is not possible to have a constant internal temperature of ~70 (which I’ve worked out is about our 20/21c) without having our heat pump on 24/7. The top of my freezer is about 20c/70, and the first two days I have stored it there, but think overnight it is getting cold even up there. The bulb in our oven had blown, lolz...and that’s not an essential service so we can’t get it replaced yet. So. My only options, other than let it fight it out with the ambient freezer top temp, is a hot water bottle and I chilly bin/esky (not sure what you call them in the US). What would you do or suggest, in that situation?
If I go to the trouble to change feeding routine and so on, which I want to do...I don’t want the temperature issue to be the hurdle that causes my efforts to be fruitless.
Thank you in advance for your advice and help...and thank you so much in general, for you excellent website. It is a bit of a gem in my books ☺️
P.S. Just so you all don’t get the wrong idea...no, we don’t all live in mud huts, or barbarically basic conditions - it’s just us, hahahahaha. Single income household, and an aversion to microwave ovens. I PROMISE we are a normal nation of totally cool people, with first world heating and housing 😜

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