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.