The Fresh Loaf

A Community of Amateur Bakers and Artisan Bread Enthusiasts.

starters; yeast water: freshness

hreik's picture
hreik

starters; yeast water: freshness

So I'm reading a lot about starters (mine is fine about 20 months old) and when i need to I just take it out a day or so b/f I'm making my dough and spruce it up.

Here are my questions:

(1) Can yeast water be maintained?

My husband is partial to a Hamelman recipe that calls for yeast water.  It takes me 4 - 5 days to make. I've read here that you can maintain it w/o remaking it each time but for the life of me how would that work?  What he likes is the complete lack of bitterness (sigh!).  I've read Akiko's method and basically it does not address the issue of maintenance.

(2) What is the best way (when I'm making other loaves to minimize 'sour'  (if I want to do that) other than minimizing retardation?  I ask b/c I've read that if you make a levain with very recently freshened starter (over a couple of days) that will accomplish the same thing.  (I ask b/c my favorite recipe is best done w an overnight retardation in the fridge)....

So say I am making 2 loaves of my favorite bread and for the overnight levain I need 60 g of starter?
Should I take out 5 g and build it up to 60 g over a day or 2? 
I guess I want to know if manipulating the number of builds of my starter will keep it sort of 'fresh' and less sour.

Thanks in advance.

hester

 

 

joc1954's picture
joc1954

About YW and maintaining it read please Dab's post.

I have several YWs, one raisin, one made from my garden grapes, one from sage. I keep them in fridge and every 2 weeks I give them 1 tablespoon of honey.

Minimizing sourness is not so easy. I am in quest for the same goal and so far I think I am almost there. So what I do:

1.) Use young levain which was inoculated with mature starter. Young for me means when the starter starts raising I use it. At that stage it would not pass a float test, but definitely it works.

2.) I use combined levains: sourdough and yeast water. I would suggest you to adjust the quantity for the beginning to 50%:50%. I start building YW levain a day before and do several stages build in order that at time when I mix the dough YW levain is bubbly and highly active. You can make a extremely nice bread just by using YW as levain. That bread you can easily retard and will get no sourness.

3.) Retarding is not an issue if you retard right after shaping and just have a slow proof. According to my experience  I would never go away from retarding. However, if you shape, proof and bake that will definitely add less sourness.

4.) One of the tricks I was experimenting with is that I use poolish (from instant or fresh yeast) made 16 hours before, then after autolyze I add just a small amount of SD levain, so it's more like an add on than the raising agent, although contributes to CO2 production and ferments the dough, but not so much that it would be sour. In my case mature poolish is the raising agent. The bread will be very good, fresh with no sourness at all (the crumb), while the crust will be far away from what you expect from the SD crust. In this case the crust is like any other bread that was risen with instant yeast. This recipe is used by one of the best bakeries in Slovenia where they claim, that the only add on in their bread is some amount of SD to keep bread fresh and more moist. I would say that you need to experiment with the amount of added SD - could be 30-50g, but due to poolish the dough will be ready sooner for final shape.

Regarding building your levain from you starter I would suggest that you use mature - very active starter and then build as much levain as the recipe calls for. To make it less sour you can use only few grams of starter in order to build  the levain in one or several stages. To reduce sourness just use the levain when it is young, so few hours after inoculation when it just starts to raise.

I would like to see some other posts here in order to learn something as well.

Happy baking, Joze

 

 

hreik's picture
hreik

It is extremely helpful to me that you defined pretty clearly what you meant by young.  So it seems like if a recipe calls for a 8 - 12 hour levain rise, (which I'm likely to do overnight) I should put it in a cooler place (not fridge) and use it b/f it is at it's peak.  Is that right?  Thanks again so much.

joc1954's picture
joc1954

I use a mature starter (sometimes I even feed starter just few hours before) and then use the levain when I see it is raising. Such starter will always raise your dough. However, there are always good and bad things. With young levain you will get a very good oven spring but you will not get very big holes . That's not a problem for me as my wife always says that she can't top butter and jam only around holes. :-)  Using young levain is the method described by Chad Robertson in his Tartine bread book.

I hope some other much more experienced members will reply to your post. For me it is easy to make a quite sour bread, but making one that is almost not sour and still has all the attributes of SD, is much harder.

One local bakery in Ljubljana, Slovenia,  that makes by my opinion the best SD bread that is just a tiny bit sour, uses this approach:

1.) feed the starter at 5:00AM (@90% hydration, 50% WW, 50% AP flour)

2:) next feeding is at 11:00AM  and the freshly fed starter is used to inoculate all levain used for their next day production. They use 20g (yes only 20g) of freshly fed starter to inoculate levain with about 3,5 kg of flour at 100% hydration (so total amount of 7kg levain). So they use only 0.5% (of the flour weight) of freshly fed starter to build the levain. You can experiment with that. The process takes 18 hours at room (23dC) temperature, but next morning the levain is bubbly and doesn't smell sour at all. Their bread is much less sour than any sourdough I was recently eating in San Francisco at Tartine bakery or Josey Bakers "The mill". Don't get me wrong, their bread is great, awesome,  but is definitely more sour than the one I am talking about. I just brought some bread back from SF and we did the tasting at the bakery.

Happy baking, Joze

hreik's picture
hreik

Bread sounds delicious.  You've given me confidence to experiment.And for what it's worth, I was really excited to get holes of various sizes when I started this journey.  Now I actually like to put my butter on bread crumb not on a hole.  Lol.  thanks again :-)

joc1954's picture
joc1954

Here is a picture of crumb I typically get by using method of young levain. I just simply like it that way and also all my consumers (neighbors, friends), especially my grand children, like it that way.

On the picture is 40% whole grain kamut bread.

Happy baking!

This one is from yesterday's bake - Oat porridge seeded SD

hreik's picture
hreik

are perfect. I wish I could sample both.... lol.  Thanks again

Mini Oven's picture
Mini Oven

I got a 3 day old mature rye sour sitting in the fridge and I won't waste it.  It's very ripe and very sour.  So, I add a teaspoon of soda into the fresh flour, reduce the salt slightly and toss in some instant yeast for a faster rise.  Kicks the sour right out of the bread.  :)  

joc1954's picture
joc1954

Great advice Mini Oven. I knew for that option but never used it so I didn't want to advise something what I haven't tested before. I had no clue that it's good to use  additional yeast after that. Something important to remember.

Thanks for sharing that!

Happy baking Mini Oven!

hreik's picture
hreik

I'll try that next time my starter is too sour.  Wonderful resource.  Thanks.