April 4, 2016 - 10:49am
Too Much Levan...?
In Ken Forkish's Flour Water Salt Yeast, many recipes instruct you to make a 900 g levan, using 400g white flour, 100 g whole wheat and 400 grams off water. Next step is to mix the final dough, using only 360 g of the levan then, if I understand correctly, throw away the remaining levan. That means I throw away almost 600 g of recently fed levan. What am I missing? If I understand it correctly, why not just make much less levan? Thanks for the help!
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When you say the next step is to mix the final dough do you mean your bread dough? So you're making 900g of Sourdough Starter and then only need 360g for your bread dough, right?
I am new to bread baking but when I take a cup or 2 out of my starter to make the bread dough I just feed my starter and keep using it in the future. I do sometimes have to throw some away if I don't use it to bake bread but not often.
Does this help?
Just make enough levain for the amount of bread you are using. The Forkish levain build is the most stupid thing ever in bread making for the last 6,000 years or so. He has a video where he tosses the 600 G in the trash and calls is spent fuel while using the remaining spent fuel to make his bread - Must be called Spent Fuel Bread :-) Everyone makes mistakes - even Bread Gods.....
Just take a small amount of starter and build the levain you want with no tossing required. Waste not want not!
dabrownman, as usual, makes a noteworthy point here : "The Forkish levain build is the most stupid thing ever in bread making." It is not false that, for example, 20 g of ripe starter fed with 30 g of flour and 30 g of water will produce a different levain than 20 g of ripe starter fed with 100 g of flour and 100 g of water. But it's doubtful that the starter which requires astronomical quantities of waste will produce a much superior bread to one based on moderation and just using what ya got. Despite Forkish's eminent status in the baking world, it's necessary to shove off from these "Gods" once in a while and adapt their wisdom to your own preferences. The end goal should always be to produce bread that makes you and the people you love very happy, and that can certainly be done without dumping valuable flour into the garbage.
If you must discard, keep it in a separate container in the fridge and make a batch of sourdough pancakes once a week. I used to save up my discard for a couple days (pouring off the darkish hooch that would occasionally surface to the top) and use it to whip up some fresh injera, a delicious Ethiopian-style flat bread made from teff flour.
Or you could just use all the levain to make more breads and stick those you don't eat immediately in the freezer.
way off too since most folks don't have a his 70 F kitchen like he does. My 70 F kitchen makes things happen way faster than his does:-) So take note.
What more levain will do is make the ferment and proof much, much faster than what he reports and what I get in my kitchen too. When you don't have time to make a normal SD bread you can increase the preferment to speed things up. No harm done as long as you watch the dough and not the clock - it will be fast. The flavor will be different but it still should have some tang due to the extra SD levain.