The Fresh Loaf

A Community of Amateur Bakers and Artisan Bread Enthusiasts.

Levain: Big Meal or Small Bites?

jey13's picture
jey13

Levain: Big Meal or Small Bites?

Hi, all. New Member here. I’m a super novice bread baker working on getting my sourdough right. I’ve been making it once a week (more or less) for going on six weeks now, and while I’ve gotten close, I’ve yet to really succeed. Most of my loaves are wide disks with dense (if tasty) interiors. I’ve been trying to fix this; this time around, one of my fixes is to radically change the levain.

The recipe I originally used had me making the 1:2:2 levain in the morning and working it into the dough some 5-6 hours later. I believe some (not all) of my initial problems were related to the fact that this levain never got quite foamy-bubbly enough. My starter can and does rise and fall within 6 hours of a feeding, but only if that is a 1:1:1 feeding. If the ratios or different, it tends to need more time to digest it all. Recently, I switched to a 1:4:4 overnight levain. This created a far more lively levain—bubbly and floating in water. And doing this overnight fit much better into my weekend baking schedule.

That said, I still had trouble at the the bulk fermentation stage, a stage that has been my bane since loaf #1. So this next time around, I’m using Chad Robertson’s recipe and method.

His overnight levain is something like 1:13:13, a big meal in the evening to make sure the levain is raring to go in the morning. I’m fine with this, but the baker who’s been trying to help me said that there’s some disagreement. Some argue that giving the levain all it’s food at one sitting isn’t good, and that, instead, it should be given it the food in smaller amounts more frequently. 

I’d like to know a little bit more about this—what the argument is, and what you all think. I’ll likely still go with Robertson’s suggested levain recipe, but I’m curious, and trying to learn as much as I can so as to produce the best sourdough I can. 

 

Doc.Dough's picture
Doc.Dough

Try prefermenting about 12% of the total flour and using a 1:2:2 ratio for your levain and let if ferment overnight.  For a 1600g batch of dough you should need about 250g of levain.  This will be made up from 50g of leftover starter + 100g of water and 100g of flour.  Cover it tighly with plastic wrap and weigh the whole thing, the bowl, levain, plastic wrap. Calculate 2% of the weight of your added flour (in this case that will be 2g) and subtract it from the measured weight.  That is your target weight for a mature levain.  I find that 8 hrs in a warm kitchen will result in the loss of around 3% of the weight of the added flour.  The weight loss is the result of the yeast consuming maltose and giving off CO2 which escapes and the weight loss is a direct measure of how much maltose has been consumed (and thus levain maturity).

Get and read Trevor Wilson's Open Crumb Mastery to learn how to manage bulk fermentation.

jey13's picture
jey13

Thank you so much for your detailed response. Can you tell me why you prefer the 1:2:2 levain over Chad Robertson's very different ratio? 

As for Wilson's book...is there anyway you could summarize his advice? Because money is really dear now, and, alas, almost every recommended artisan bread book is pricy. I'm sorry, but I can't afford to buy any of them at the moment. Which is why I came here for advice rather than going to Amazon to purchase more bread books.

calneto's picture
calneto

I paid 10 USD for the previous edition of Open Crumb Mastery. I got the electronic version, which even has links to videos of shaping etc.

Doc.Dough's picture
Doc.Dough

1:13:13 will work.  It mostly depends on your timeline and your growth temperature. A high refresh ratio will take a little longer to mature. Remember that the yeast and LAB numerical density doubles at a constant rate that depends on temperature. If the kitchen is in the mid 80's, expect a doubling time of around 2 to 3 hrs depending on your particular starter. So 1:2:2 has to grow by a factor of 4 and after one doubling you have twice as much as you started with (consuming 1 part of the flour you added) and after another doubling you have 4 (using an additional 2 parts of flour.  At 1:13:13 you need to multiply up to a factor of 26 (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, ..) or an additional three doubling times.  The lack of vigor in your dough is a strong hint that your levain was wimpy when you mixed the dough and this is rarely because you waited too long to use the levain.

I usually mix my levain sometime after dinner and before I go to bed and give it at least 8 hrs to mature before I use it.l  You could do this by starting early in the morning but you may be rushed at the other end of the process where timing counts for a lot.  The test is levain weight loss.  Two percent of the added flour is a good target, though if you wait 24 hrs it may lose as much as 6%, but by then it really will be past its prime. If you mix with warm water it will be faster but still governed by room temperature after it has a chance to come to equilibrium.  And depending on how long your starter has been in the refrigerator and exactly what temperature the refrigerator was set to, it may take a while for it to rebuild the mechanisms required for cell division (generally figure on one additional doubling time for that).  Target temperature for starter storage is 3°C which is good for 7 to 14 days.  At 7°C cut the storage time in half.

One more hint.  Make one formula until you master it.  Constantly changing the formulation to escape failure does not allow you to ever understand what you had to do to succeed.  After 50 to 100 trials you will know what to do and why.  It may take longer if you are baking only once per week.

jey13's picture
jey13

Robertson says use a Tablespoon of starter. I measured that out and weighed it...came to almost exactly 20g. So with 200 flour mix (whole wheat and bread) and 200 water, that’s 1:10:10. I made the levain at around 8pm with a warmed up and active starter. I’m hoping to mix up the dough soon as I get up, which will likely be around 7am, maybe as early as 6am. So the levain will have around 10 hours, which, from what you say, should be both enough and yet not too much. From there I follow Robertson’s recipe. We’ll see how goes.

As for your philosophy of 100 failures...I’m not trying to win a war or cure cancer, I’m trying to make sourdough bread. If I’m going to go all Sisyphus on something, it’s going to have to matter a whole lot more to me than flour and yeast. So, here’s hoping Robertson’s recipe gets me better results, because it’s trial time is limited. I promise you, it won’t get past five tries, let alone to 50. I’ve a life to live. 

Doc.Dough's picture
Doc.Dough

It is only flour, water, salt, and starter.

jey13's picture
jey13

And snowboarding is just riding a board down snow, and fencing is just waving around a stick. ;-D By that logic, after all, chocolate chip cookies which contain way more ingredients than a pie crust (butter, sugar, eggs, vanilla, flour, baking soda, salt and chocolate chips) should be way harder to make. And yet a successful batch of chocolate chip cookies can be out of the oven within 30 minutes, usually with a low failure rate. Meanwhile, pie crusts have a high failure rate. Wrong amount of fat or water and it will fail. Not mixing the fat correctly into the dough, failure. Not rolling it out right, not baking it in the right pie plate...fail, fail, fail. 

Ditto with sourdough. It's not, after all, about the amount of ingredients, it's about getting them to do what you want them to do: (1) create gluten, and (2) ferment. Getting them to do both of these, isn't so easy. And making sure you get enough fermentation, and don't lose all of those airy bubbles while shaping...that is especially hard. It's not dealing with flour/water/salt/starter that's the problem...it's dealing with the bubbles. 

Which is what makes the world of artisanal bread making so very interesting to me. Half of the bakers in videos and websites (and here) talk like engineers. They write up calculations on chalk boards, discussformulas, measure exactly, even create environments in ovens, or the ovens themselves to exacting standards. The other half say "about this many cups of flour and this much water, a heaping spoonful of starter or just toss it into a dutch oven and bake...." like bread making is an art project. And both of them say: "who knows how each batch of dough will come out? It's up to the weather, air conditions, phase of the moon..." 

It's a very strange way of doing things. It's offered up as an exacting science on one hand, creative expression on the other hand...and yet completely arbitrary; almost a roll of the dice on the third hand...I've yet to figure out how it can be all of these at once :-D