New Mum’s Food Adventures

First I did brown basmati but it went horribly. So I had to starter over. I tried brown basmati and white and it went horribly. There was just an undesirable flavour unique to the brown basmati. And I couldn’t get it to a fine enough grind. This was the jar on the right. I since restarted with brown rice short grain and jasmine white rice 1:1 blend. It smells sweet already probably due to the jasmine. The jar on the left if YesYouCan plain gluten free flour and the jasmine and brown rice mix. Equal parts of the rice flour blend to gf flour. I added honey in the one on the right to speed the process of fermentation up. It smells lovely and is going well.

Hardest part is grinding my own rice flour. I am doing the best I can with my breville boss blender grinding on the mill setting for 1 minute and allowing the rice to cool after. The brown basmati rice has and is always fussy. It’s to hard to grind fine enough without a grain mill. but it probably would still not work out quite right. But here are some things that went wrong.

Contamination. Sometimes it’s the spoon sometimes it’s the air, sometimes it’s because the starter was to hungry and bad bacteria made its way in. This is where fine flour is ideal. As for the YesYouCan flour my first starter went so so and it got contaminated fast and it turns out I wasn’t feeding it enough. My second one got mould but I don’t know why. Now I’m trying it out blended with rice flour. I feel if the rice flour is added it winger hungry to fast and spoil and it might help with the ph level.

One thing I found helpful was adding sugar to not only speed up the fermentation but yield more predictable timing for the rise of the starter. I have used honey, raw sugar and white sugar. I have not tried maple syrup or fresh fruit yet. I want to try yeast water and I want to try apple grated into my starter at some point.

After a lot of searching it is recommended to stir gluten free starter a few times a day to reduce mold and improve results. So I am stirring more and I get why. Especially with the way the rice flour sits in the liquid and seperates. A finer grind would help but I cannot afford store bought rice flours for starter. My goal is to buy a mockmill.

My buckwheat starter went moody super fast. I think it had to do with moisture in the flour and it got to hungry too fast. It did smell nice and show potential. But at this current point in time, it is not cost effective to use buckwheat flour.

As for my other findings I am interested in yeast water. I want to know more about what fruits and how safe this is to make. I have a number of fruit trees and they are in bloom. I also have an enormous crop of blueberries coming. If adding fruit helps starter then I want to try it because so far gluten free starter has been more errors than trials.