October 6, 2016 - 3:47am
Continuing my quest for the perfect tang
So now I have rethought my mother culture maintenance and my levain build for more tang (basically lower hydration for both, including some wholegrain and using when its overly ripe) I still have a question or two.
If bacteria like a warm and wet environment why does a dryer mother culture/levain and retarding in the fridge help to increase flavour?
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Hi Abe.
It doesn't, necessarily. With a lower hydration and cooler temperatures what you do get is a slower development of acids overall (TTA). In addition the balance will shift towards more acetic in mixes drier and colder. But this is just acid we're talking here. Flavour is a bigger part of the picture.
With warmer and wetter mixtures numbers of bacteria and yeasts will increase up to their respective limits.
Drier mixes will require more ripening time to develop more acid, however you must understand wetter mixes are more dilute.
Note that acetic acid is the sharper acid while lactic is quite mild.
Whole flour will always help to boost acid (TTA).
So I've got a basics right but it's not the whole picture. It's more complex then that under the microscope. What seems to be a contradiction is not. For a healthy starter we need a good amount of yeasts and bacteria. While lower hydration does help, this is for acetic only and lactic acid favours higher hydration. Warmer temperature increase both yeasts and bacteria. So increasing both then cooling just tips the balance.
I've just had another thought. I may be wrong here but it seems logical. Fermenting at warmer temperature increases both. Cooling then favours the lactic and makes the yeast dormant. Baking will wake the yeasts up to complete their job (albeit in extra fast time) of contributing to oven spring.
There's so much to learn.
P.s. have a look at http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/49347/pane-di-matera-materas-bread
Does the yeast not do its job before loading in the oven? My understanding is that cold little bubbles already present expand as the temperature rises, as gas will do, creating various bubbles in the bread.
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too much ripe starter! dying and exploding... so funny ! Just about choked on my cocoa!
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Lactic is the sour and acetic is the tang but everything is relative. LAB love the wet (100% hydration) way more than the dry (60% hydration). They also like the warm ( 92 F ) way better than the cold, (60 F or less). Normally LAB produce lactic acid when not stressed but, if stressed with lower temperatures and less water, they can be encouraged to make acetic acid instead of lactic - making for more tang.
The other way to get more acid is to change the LAB to yeast ratio in the culture. Some culture have 10 times the amount of LAB to yeast but others can be 100 times the LAB to yeast ratio. So to get ore LAB and resulting mire acid you can use temperature to skew it . Either 36 F for a very very long time, say 8 weeks or 92 F for an hour at high hydration and a bit of fructose added to the mix, then cut the hydration and keep it at 60 F for a couple fo days and then retard it at 35 F for weeks and weeks. You get more LAB producing acetic acid for more tang.
The 3 rd thing is bran. Bran acts as buffer to allow LAB to keep producing acids at much lower pH's than normal which means more acid and sour. I was amazed at how much this really matters - more than anything else really for TTA.
So this is how you get your starter, levain and dough to have more acid and tang. It is fun to experiment but you will need a TTA meter to know how each effects the mix.
So crank up the LAB to yeast ratio in that whole grain starter buy building it at low hydration and multi temperatures and store it for weeks at 36 F, build a bran levain from it at 92 F and then retard the dough at 38 - 50 F for 20 hours. You will have as much sour as you can make with your starter.
The most important things in order are, Bran, high temerature, high hydratin, low hydration and low temperature and knowing when to employ each..
Happy sour baking Abe
And make a document of all this.
So from what I can deduce is my mother culture is fine. Build a bran levain (as long as it fits in with the recipe i'm doing). Think this will have to be my own recipe. Then retard the dough.
Bread baking doesn't seem complex until one learns how to really control each step and having to know what's going on to manipulate the outcome.
These no knead breads and new ways of doing it can make it seem less complicated but to really know what you're doing and not to stumble on an outcome takes a lot of knowledge.
Thank you Dabrownman.
"buffer to allow LAB to keep producing acids at much lower pH's than normal"
That's not what buffers do. Buffers allow keeping pH virtually the same when additional acid is introduced by tying (sort of) it up. So as long as buffering capacity is not exhausted, additional acid can be produced without any changes in pH. Of course, it is also worth noting that buffering ability of whole wheat/bran is a term that is thrown around without any real numbers attached to it.
I've been meaning to make this point for a long time.
Just to word it another way for all:
The buffering is mostly due to the presence of phytic acid. This buffering effect means that as fermentation proceeds and acids, mostly lactic and acetic develop the pH is held up.
pH is pH. The LAB of interest work within a range and will shut down once the pH drops low enough, this is inevitable.
produced when bran is in the mix vs no bran? This happens every time. Not only is more acid produced, it is produced at a lower pH too making for an end culture that has a much lower pH than the control without any bran. I would see you point if the pH wasn't markedly lower in the bran culture. The extra acid isn't being neutralized with the bran culture coming out with the same pH.
The results are really quite striking.
Happy baking
There is lot of possible explanations for that and some may have nothing to do with fermentation. First of all - when you look at the ripe sourdough it is not at the maximum amount of acid it can produce. You can let it sit for 2-3 times as much time and will get more sour, so it is quite possible that the operating word is not more, but faster. For example, when you mix two 100% starters, white and whole wheat, you add up to 15% of dead weight with ww, so if you inoculate them from the same batch one will have higher percentage of starter to strach (or free sugars), and ferment faster. But may be it's at the same time also more - the starters are not going to be at the same hydration - bran may be a dead weight as a source of nutrtion, but it will absorb water making one of the mixtures denser and denser sour can attain higher acidities. So they could be different just from the way you mixed them. And the measurement - I myself alway preferred to go with TTA - sticking electrode into the starter never seemed like a good way to do it, and papers don't have enough resolution. And then we can talk about ash and how exactly it can increase acidity, and has anyone looked at whether degradation of phytic acid increases TTA? And I am going to bed now.
Use a 30% levain and go long on the levain ferment - 12+ hours for very sour though 8 hours is a happy medium (based on 77 dF).
Wild-Yeast
I'm experimenting taking the levain ferment longer. I'm also going by smell. Waiting for a really good aroma before using. It makes sense to me that if it smells alcoholic it'll make a more flavoursome bread.