August 8, 2017 - 10:42am
Levain recipe in FWSY
Over the years I've started my own levains with pretty good success. But I've never used as much flour as described in the book Flour Water Salt Yeast by Ken Forkish. My rough calculations indicate that by day 5, I would have thrown away about 4 lbs of flour. Seems like waste of good flour if I can accomplish the same result using far less flour which I've done many times in the past making my own levain. Any thoughts about what seems like a horrible waste of good flour.
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Tony, you've encountered the most common and wholly justified criticism of Ken Forkish's otherwise fantastic book: He instructs home bakers to be as wasteful of flour as one can apparently get away with when one is baking for profit. I even went so far as to develop a formula for a Spent Fuel Boule, to make better use of the excess I generated by slavishly following his formulae and processes. Rest assured that you can cut back the volumes down to whatever you need for a bake plus a bit (a tiny bit is enough -- there are billions of bugs in a few grams of starter) to re-inoculate your stock. That said, there are theoretically some advantages to larger volume levains, owing to the heat generated by the mass during fermentation. But I've not found that supposed benefit worth the cost.
If you want to really save on levain flour, search TFL for dabrownman's No Fuss No Muss (?) procedure. No wastage at all, but a more sour product.
Happy Baking,
Tom
I'll try that spent fuel boule.
Rather than let Ken Forkish's bad advice lead you (as it did me) to bake more bread than intended, I suggest you just reduce your starter volumes to less wasteful levels. The Spent Fuel Boule was an instructive exercise for me, as much as anything else, to see if I understood the process well enough to adapt it to a formula that used an absurd amount of levain (58% of the formula's total flour). It worked, so I posted it, but in retrospect I'd strongly advise not to waste your time or flour on it, unless the product of a loaf made with 58% prefermented flour suits you. There are better breads and formulas out there!
Happy Baking,
Tom
So I'm on day 3 of a very active culture using freshly milled hard red winter wheat (100 g wheat/100g water). Those wheat berries must be loaded with the levain critters.
is probably due to bad bacteria. It should be going very quiet soon and while it is quiet, hold off on feeding and just give it a good stir a few times a day. It will show more activity in a few days and then start feeding it again.
Once you have it going well, you can consider going to the No Fuss, No Muss method. Basically it is that you thicken your starter so that it will keep for weeks and even months in the fridge.
To make a loaf of bread, you take a tiny bit (10 g for example) of the no fuss, no muss starter and feed it 10 g of flour and 10 g of water. Once it peaks several hours later, double the feeding to 20 g flour and 20 g water. I usually double this again for one more rise before I build my final levain. My final levain is very roughly 80% hydration so I feed it 80% water to 100% of the flour to bring it to the amount I need. If you need a 100% hydration levain, then just feed it half flour, half water for the missing Portion of the amount you need. This way, I am past the throwing out the huge quantities of flour following the Forkish way even though I was making a quarter of what he called for.
I hope this helps!