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Yeast Water Questions

ifs201's picture
ifs201

Yeast Water Questions

Hi,

I have a standard sourdough recipe that I like to use and tweak a bit, but I am wondering how I can incorporate some yeast water that I just made. For example, I normally do about 10% levain inoculation and 80% hydration.

  • Can I simply do the levain build using some YW instead of regular water?
  • Should I decrease the amount of levain in the recipe?
  • How much YW would you add for about 1.5kg of dough? I was thinking about 50g. 

 

Thanks!

Ilene 

Our Crumb's picture
Our Crumb

Ilene, there are no particular rules that I know of about the use of YWs.  I've used them in a number of ways, but never as you've suggested, "do the levain build using some YW instead of regular water".  As a general rule, I would always avoid mixing different levains prior to a bake, but only combine them at dough mixing time, when they have been grown up separately.  Otherwise, you'll have them competing for the same feed and one will inevitably out-compete the other, resulting a shortage of the 'loser' in the final levain.

If you usually preferment 10% of a formula's flour, then I would suggest dividing up that 10% between the two sources of levaning: YW and SD.  For example, take 5% of the formula's flour and mix it with YW at 80% hydration and grow it up until it domes.  That's your YW levain.  Do the same with 5% of the formula's flour with your SD.  At mixing time, combine these with rest of the formula's flour, water and salt.  Or use another combination: 7% + 3% or whatever suits you.  You'll have to watch the dough carefully, because your YW levain won't perform like the SD you're used to.  Mine have always been more active (hence my surprise that Danny and Jeff H's recent CB called for prefermenting 50% of the formula's flour in YW -- that's a bomb).

Make sense?  Hope so.  If not, let me know.  Obviously my comment assumes you want to mix YW and SD in the same formula.  If not, then just preferment 10% of your formula flour in YW and when it's domed, used it just like you would SD.  Using both might be interesting - take the tangy edge off 100% SD.

Tom

ifs201's picture
ifs201

Unfortunately I just saw your response. 

The good news is I didn't combine my starter and YW as you warned against. The bad news is I just added 30g of YW during the 1-hour autolyse, replacing 30g of water. So it's a 10% starter inoculation + 30g of YW. It's an experiment! I'll let you know how it goes. Next time I'll try doing a separate build using YW, as per your suggestion. 

leslieruf's picture
leslieruf

I just make the SD levain as usual then a YW preferrment. You would probably struggle to to do an autolyse as well because so much of the liquid is already spoken for.  The one I make is a high hydration white with 14% prefermented  flour sd levain and 20% prefermented flour YW levain.  both SD and YW were 100% hydration.   It is a wet dough but does come together nicely for me but you could easily reduce hydration. 

Leslie

ifs201's picture
ifs201

Thanks, Leslie! I'll definitely try this method next time.