Going with the usage of these terms in Reinhart, where they have about the same hydration, and a pate fermentee has salt but a biga doesn't (and perhaps a bit less yeast), how does using a biga vs a pate fermentee affect the outcome of a recipe? Will taking a recipe that calls for one and using the other (adjusting for the salt difference in the final dough) change the result in any noticeable way? Has anyone experimented with this?
Eric
Well, sometimes I share victories, but today it's not the case. I am feeling quite miserable about bread baking this weekend.
where do I start?
I am a HUGE Hamelman & Dan Lepard's fan. Every single bread I made from their books turned out great. Then I bought Local Breads and fell in love with the book, read it beginning to end, could not wait to try my first recipe.
I picked "Como Bread", for those who have the book, it is on page222
I recently found a recipe by JMonkey for Whole Wheat Buttermilk bread that he posted on July 10, 2006. A search of TFL will quickly locate the original post for you, and I would recommend that you read it. The bread he made was based on one of the recipes from Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book, but JMonkey did a comparison of baking it "straight" and baking with a biga. His success with the biga version inspired me to try it myself. I have had very little success with whole grain baking in the past. Most of my breads were much too heavy, and often had a slightly bitter taste.
Hello. I have several questions about starters. Please bear with me being new at this. First, the starter I am using is 1 cup flour, 1 cup water, 1 tsp yeast. First question. Can I use wheat flour in my starter? Second question. I have read that after being refrigerated, it will last for two weeks. Can I just work from this one starter for two weeks and not add to it to make it grow. In other words, I would like to have a starter, use it and then make another starter. I don't want one that I have to feed. Is this possible? Also, can I add starter to any bread recipe? Can I use
Hi all,
I have a question about the hydration of a pre-ferment. I realize that changing the hydration makes it either a biga or a poolish, but I don't care so much about the name as I do the result! I just made Hamelman's Rustic Bread with a few changes, and the family loved it. I doubled the ww (there's not that much to begin with), and used it in the pre-ferment instead of the final dough. It worked wonderfully, but I'd like to go a little further and up the ww % even further, maybe to 50% eventually.
The Artisan web site (www.theartisan.net) has several recipes for semolina breads. Today, I made one of the ones that uses 100% durum flour. (The others are 1/2 durum and 1/2 AP flour.). This uses a biga made with 20% of the total flour in the formula. It has really short fermentation times - a 30 minute "rest" which serves as the bulk fermentation and a 75 minute proofing.
I formed two small round loaves of about 400 gms each which baked in 25 minutes.
I noticed there are some recipes that require commercial yeast in addition to making an overnight biga, While others don't use commercial yeast and depend only on the starters yeast. Why is this? More of a rise? would there not be a trade off between taste?
Also, what's more preferrable, a biga or a poolish (I'm guessing it would depend on your desired final hydration level?)
A recipe for white loaf bread (or rolls) that uses a biga preferment.
If anyone wants the recipe and instructions you get it at http://home.earthlink.net/~myjunketc/bigaWhiteLoafBread.pdf
