Help with Sourdough Starter

I get it!!!  Unfortunately, it is not good news. 

You can not make a sourdough bread with all sproated flour unless you add gluten.  You can use sproated flour to feed the starter.  You can use sproated flour for part of the flour in a sourdough recipe.  But you can not use only sproated flour because yeast breads (including sourdough) need gluten to rise.  A yeast bread without enough gluten will be dense and crumbly.  That sounds like your dough.

Here is a link to a page on the Cheeseslave sight that has a little info about sourdough bread and sproated flour: http://www.cheeseslave.com/no-knead-sourdough-bread/.  This is one of the recipes that she uses in her class.  On this page she is not feeding the starter with sproated flour but she does mention doing it in her class.  I think she just had not experimented much with it yet when she put up this page.  The info about gluten I got from one of my cookbooks (CookWise – excellent resource for understanding the science of cooking but does not encourage whole food cooking).

Schele