yeast water questions
I just made my first batch of yeast water and found it dead simple or else got lucky. Just throw some organic raisins and smashed organic apple in filtered water (ours is well water) and let it sit on the counter for a few days and it starts to ferment nicely with lots of bubbles and a very nice fruity smell. Baking with it will come this weekend. What are the advantages other than having a ready source are there to keeping this starter over just starting a new one each time I want to bake with one? Does it developed a character like sourdough starter or is it a more neutral source of leavening ongoing? Also about how much of the water do you use in the preferment for one loaf which is usually around 850 grams total weight? I haven't been able to find the answers so thought might as well ask the experienced.
Thanks in advance,
Stu
so I can track the answer to this. I'm curious as well.
In an 850 g loaf at 70% hydration would have 500 g of flour (850/1.7) and 350 g of liquid. If using 15% prefermented flour in the YW levain then you would have 75 g of flour in it and 75 g of YW as the liquid to make a levain of 150 g total. The dough would have 425 g of flour and 275 g of water or some other liquid.
Just mix the flour and YW for the levain a leave to double in volume like you would any other levain and add back 75 g of water to the YW starter to fill it back up. No reason to start a new one each time.
Sometimes I use YW only, no water at all. Or you can do it as DBM described above.
After each use, I add new raisin (whatever amount) + 5x that amount of water to the jar to refresh. Once in a while when I'm lazy, I just add water. Either way, when the YW is active again (bubbling), I store it back in the fridge.
The main thing about YW is that it leavens the dough faster, doesn't make your bread tangy, gives the loaf more open crumbs than just using starter alone. But at the same time, it's not acting as fast as commercial yeast, your dough still develops good flavors when it's used without a starter. And it's super easy to maintain.
I think of it this way: Starter gives my dough flavors, and YW gives it power.