meh

On a side note, my sourdough starter didn't turn out.

Not to fear, however. I've spent a few weeks perusing the sourdough website, and all of the posts about getting a starter going say that it can take a few tries to get it right and get one going.

The good thing is that my starter wasn't infected with bad bacteria. In fact, it was going great the first few days. However, once I progressed into the 7th day it became quite obvious that my starter had pretty much "died", in the sense that it wasn't active anymore. I'm not quite sure what went wrong but after reading the troubleshooting guide it could have been any number of reasons, from the fluctuation of temperature to simply a bad batch of flour that didn't have enough bacteria present. My 8th day batch had started to collect "hooch" on the surface, rather than growing, which means that the alcohol byproduct was collecting on the surface rather than the bacteria growing, which resulted in my starter dying.

No worries. I'll be starting another batch this week with the same flour, only trying a couple of different techniques to see if I can't get it to work this time. Some of the people on that website, even the veteran bakers, suggest that even they sometimes have starters that refuse to get going and simply need to be restarted, so I'm not losing hope, not in the least :) It was a first time try, and I'll be doing another one shortly.