Sourdough Nonstarter

I feel like an absolute failure. Well, that’s not entirely true. I feel like a slight failure.

I opened the lid to my sourdough starter today and found what appeared to be tiny slugs all over the surface. Mind you, I have been working on this starter since May 10th. (Time check: It is August 1st.) I have read troubleshooting about it and apparently, slugs might be attracted to yeast so much that micro-brewers use sourdough starter to distract slugs from their beer. Are you kidding me?

I feel like this is the type of thing that only happens to me though part of my issue is that I tend to believe nonsense Internet hype. So many people have posted about how straight-forward it is to learn, but I have not made one loaf that I consider average in the past three months.

I mostly want to bake bread because (1) it is hard to find tasty sourdough and (2) I want fresh bread without going to the store all the time.

I made four loaves with the now deceased starter, of which only one rose while in the oven. I’m perplexed with all these tutorials about mastering the sourdough technique in a week. Huh? Am I missing something?

Logically, it doesn’t make sense how you can master something that is the basis of an entire profession so quickly, so I’m (once again) judging myself for believing the hype.

I do want to try again. This will actually be my third starter to initiate because I used the wrong flour the first time around. Or, at least I think I did. I’m not totally sure either way.

Anyway, I might write more another day about my sourdough nonstarter experience. For now, I thought I would open up about a failure.