New Mum’s Food Adventures

I’m retrying gluten free starter. I have had an awful time with it. It gets contaminated fast! I even made sure to use metal spoons sanitised in boiled water. My biggest issue is cost as well. And I don’t have a grain mill but I am going to need one. It’s over 15 dollars for a bag of brown rice flour and it’s not even 1kg! So grinding my own is a bit problematic because I can’t get it fine enough. So I found a post about chickpea starter. I did my best to grind up some brown basmati rice into flour and triple sifted it. It was going so so. Then I added a whole box of Mackenzie’s Rice flour which is white rice and suddenly I had success. There was no rise in the brown basmati but the smell was pleasant. Often floral in a weird way. But it quickly turned slightly alcohol scented meaning it’s hungry. It’s spring in Australia and the hot weather has begun and my chickpea starter is ready on day 4. It’s day 7 for the rice starter and I combined both discards in a jar and added some YesYouCan gluten free flour to it like I was feeding the starter to see what happens. I want to see if it rises or not because if it won’t do anything to the gluten free flour then I am saving myself some hassle. If it does nothing with its rise, it will add fermentation and flavour so I have packet yeast to fall back on. With gluten free sourdough I usually end up using packaged yeast because it is so sensitive and I don’t want to waste my products.

Further research and unfortunately there’s not a huge amount of info on why gluten free starter gets mouldy fast if using store bought gluten free all purpose flour. My theory is the xanthum gum might play a roll. But I’m not totally sure. The popular opinion is the starter is hungry and that’s what leads to mold so fast. More than once, my store bought gluten free flour has ended up not just smelling bad but smelling like farts. Not sure what is going on there. When it smells like acetone it’s extra difficult for me to get the smell to go away and I think that has more to do with my kitchen being too hot.

Either way if I succeed then I will make a post about it and also for my own record. I’m thinking of making a blend. Hopefully my current experiment goes well. I’m making a test overnight loaf tonight.