Trevor’s book and levain building!
I need someone to check my math and make sure that what I am doing makes sense. Normally, I build up 1250 g of roughly 80% hydration levain like this:
Thursday night: I take 20 g of refrigerated starter and feed it 20 g each of water and whole grain flour. 1:1:1
Friday morning: I feed it 40 g each of water and whole grain flour. 1:0.6:0.6
Friday night: I feed it 80 g each of water and whole grain flour. 1:0.58:0.59
Saturday morning which is dough making day: I feed it 422 g of water, 106 g of whole grain flour and 422 g of unbleached flour. 1:1.4:1.76. (Wow, I’ve never done the math like this... I am ending up with some very interesting numbers). This triples in 4-5 hours depending on whether I use rye or whole-wheat. Rye makes it zoom along.
So according to Trevor, I probably have way too much of an acid load for a more open crumb and oven spring. I will have to play with how I feed my starter for an 80% hydration levain but for this weekend, I am actually following a recipe and not creating my own (for the most part). I need 1860 g of 100% levain. So the plan is this:
Thursday night: Take 10 g of starter and feed it 30 g each of water and whole wheat flour. 1:3:3
Friday morning: Feed it 210 g each of water and flour. 1:3:3
Friday night: Feed it 870 g each of water and flour. 1:3:3
Use Saturday morning. This is feeding 1:3:3 all the way but to me it seems crazy to start with only 10 g of starter and a day and a half later end up with 2030 g of levain.
Am I figuring this out correctly?
This is also bringing up a whole lot of questions in my mind. Is this why my bulk fermentations always take 5 or so hours when I see a lot of people here with much shorter times? Is my oven spring affected by this? How is this going to affect my final proofing in the fridge? Yes, I know most are going to say you need to go ahead and experiment but a few thoughts wouldn’t hurt. Oh and I need to keep reading Trevor’s book... I only just finished the starter part. ;-)