January 8, 2018 - 12:23pm
Converting sourdough recipe to non-sourdough
Hello all! I had great help on my first question on TFL and now I'm hoping to get good help on the next.
I see all kinds of amazing recipes here. Many of them are sourdough and I haven't yet branched out into the sourdough realm (partially because I'm worried about keeping one going with my schedule). With that being said, I would still love to try out these awesome recipes. Is there a way that I can convert a sourdough recipe into a recipe I could try baking without the sourdough starter?
Any suggestions are greatly appreciated!
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but while it worked converting instant yeast into sourdough, it didn’t work in reverse. That being said, Ken Forkish uses between 3 and 4 grams of yeast for 1000 g of flour. You could do the same taking into account that your dough may rise a lot faster than stated in the recipe.
The other thing is to take into account the amount of flour and water that would be in the sourdough portion and make sure to add that to your dough. For example, if the recipe calls for 200 g of starter/levain at 100% hydration ( it means that there is equal amounts of flour and water in the Levain), so you would need to be sure to add 100 g of flour and 100 g of water in addition to what is called for. Most recipes mean 100% hydration when they don’t specify. So that’s easy since half is flour and half is water.
It gets a little trickier when you are dealing with 80% Levain like in most of my recipes. It means that the sourdough is 4 parts water to 5 parts flour and you can do the math from there.
The rest of the recipe should stay the same aside from timing. I hope this helps.
Wow! Great information. You rock. Thanks for the help. I'm going to give it a shot and let you know how it goes.
For instance if a recipe asks for
You could do the following:
Poolish:
Leave that overnight and use the next day when ready. After which go onto the final dough:
Then for the method you'll have to watch the dough and not the clock. Perform the stretch and folds etc but timing will be different. If you're confident in reading the dough and knowing when it's done by feel then it shouldn't be a problem.
Thanks for a great idea. I had a similar thought at one time but now I think I'll give it a go. Thanks!
For a poolish you want 1% fresh yeast of the flour within the poolish or divide by 3 for dried yeast.
So in our example 1% was .75g fresh yeast (I rounded it to 8) and dried yeast is a third of that so I put it as .3g (not exact but from the top of my head).
Try a sourdough recipe where it's 30-50% starter which would be a good range for a poolish when converting. You don't want one where the starter is really low, like 10%, as it's not really in a normal poolish range.
See how it goes and I look forward to results.