Help Interpreting Calvel's Taste of Bread Recipes
Hey y'all,
I just joined but i have been lurking here for ideas since i started baking regularly a little over two months ago with my own home grown levain. My question is this. I have a few books and I have been experimenting with a few recipes attempting to convert them roughly to take a levain rather than store-bought yeast. The latest attempt was with The Taste Of Bread. I poured over it for several hours last night to convert it to a two loaf recipe, the Pain de Campagne, and I think i did an ok job until I got down to a few ingredients including the percentage of yeast in one column and the percentage of yeast in another column. Granted, I am converting to levain, but still, I am very uncertain if the ingredients in the dough column are cumulative with the preferment column or in addition to. So I faked it as best i could which is what i have been doing with most recipes since I don't have a mixer and have been using my digits for all of these recipes.
Anyone out there understand how to "read" his recipes?
All help will be greatly appreciated. And, though, I have dug and dug and have a ballpark idea of how much levain to use depending on the recipe, I am still learning and experimenting which seems to be the most fun, but if anyone has any insight to how much levain is needed depending on the type of recipe, time of year, elevation, etc, I would greatly appreciate that as well.
Thanks again,
Mike