January 30, 2018 - 3:50am
sourdough recipe question
I now have (thanks to all of you) two starters: a potato based starter and another that I converted over to as a flour based starter. I also found a recipe online whereby I mix one cup of starter with 2 cups flour and 1.5c water to start and sit for a couple of days in the fridge before adding my final 2 cups flour and 2.5tsp salt. It works well for 2 loaves. My question: sometimes when I mix the original levain, the bubbles seem really big and evenly distributed. Other times they are small and basically hang around only around the edge of the bowl. I'm confident this means something to the outcome of my bread, but I don't know what. Can anyone enlighten me as to why this happens?
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I have a sourdough starter that is doing great. I have been using KA AP Flour and it works well but I want to mix in some wheat flour to make it more nutritious. I have tried regular KA wheat flour and it was dry as dry could be. I am also trying the KA White Wheat Flour. What do I need to compensate for using wheat flour? Do I need to add more water?
You haven't given us too much detail about your starter. The normal procedure most of us follow is...
1: keep a little starter in the fridge.
2: build a Levain (an off shoot starter) the evening before making the dough. This involves taking a little starter and mixing it with some water and flour (both a % of the final dough of course but how much depends on what you're after) and leaving that to bubble up at room temperature.
3: Next day - mix the dough and bulk ferment and at this time incorporate stretch and folds to develop the gluten.
4: shape and final proof.
5: bake.
Now the dough can be retarded in the fridge at the bulk ferment or final proof stage. How long depends on how much levain % and at what stage etc.
Thank you Lechem! I have a great starter that I do exactly as you stated (fridge, then levin, then mix and shape and bake). I was using KA AP flour. I mixed it with whole wheat flour recently to try and make it more healthy and it was hard as a brick. I thought maybe a white wheat flour from KA would be better so I'm trying that but I can tell already that its hard and not pliable. What do people do when they are making wheat bread? Do they add more water? use a mixture of AP & Wheat flours?
100% hydration for a starter. That means equal amounts of flour and water by weight! At 100% hydration you should have no problem with any flour. Infact even at lower hydration you'd have to be going very low to get what you're describing. I've just kneaded a 50% hydrated bread flour starter for a bread I'm doing tomorrow or Saturday. It took some kneading but made a nice dough ball. Granted it's bread flour and whole wheat needs more water. Whole wheat at 75-80% hydrating would be still easy to incorporate even though it's not considered a liquid starter anymore but more like a dough. So how much water to flour are you using?
100% hydration is popular as it's easy to mix and you always know how much water and flour it has by weighing it and dividing by two.
Equal amounts of flour and water by weight.
I'll keep about 80g (40g water + 40g flour) in the fridge.
From which I'll take some off before each bake to build a Pre-Ferment.
When my starter runs low I'll take it out and give it some TLC. So to the little remaining I'll feed it an equal amount of water to flour by weight so I'm back up to 80g. I'll allow this to activate and become bubbly but will refrigerate before it peaks and falls. Back into the fridge it goes where it can sit for for another week.
If I haven't used up so much for some reason then I'll still give it another feed regardless about once a week following the same procedure.
Everyone has a variation on this theme. Sometimes my own schedule does vary but that's basically what I'm doing. It can be fed bread flour, whole wheat or rye. I'm more meticulous when it comes to the recipe and levain build. My starter is just where I store the yeasts and bacteria.