Preferments - starters, biga,sponge,pollish et al
Ok This is my first post - I have this nagging question after experimenting with my bread making the last yr.
I have been reading reinharts text ( break bakers apprentice) and taken a bread baking class and I have come to the conclusion that
1. Preferments are critical for best tasting bread - however that it doesn't reeally matter - a Starter, biga, poolish, preferment, sponge - they only really differ by water content - so if you make a biga it las less water than a poolish you can use them in the same recipe you just need to adjust the water content. I usually find it very easy just to add a couple cups of flour and some water 1-2 cups, a pinch of instant yeast - the exact amounts are really not that important - just mix up a patch and let it ferment !
2. More confusing to me - is that if you are going to go through the trouble to make a preferment - How is that different from just making the whole dough batch mixing it up (without kneading) and letting the dough preferment 12-24 hours - ??? Then just prepare as usual adding flour or water ad needed ? seems to create very taste bread for me .
3. Recipe smecifi - I admit I hate following recipe's - once you develope a feel for the mix - (just like making pancakes - anyone who has to measure pancake mix and water and cannot just tell when the batter is the way they want it is well, either completly ocd or ??) I just get a feel for when the dough is the right consistency, try to get confortable with wetter doughs - add whatever I feel like into the dough, herbs, seeds, oats, barlley, different flours - whatever I have on hand , and all my breads seem to be quite tastey. So to me it seems like unless you are a bakery and trying to put out the exact loaf all the time - the whole idea is to have fun , be artistic, creative and experiment - don't be a slave to recipes .
I am interested in your comments .
kj
I think the feel is the most important. I wouldn't however dismiss recipes because that is where you start. When I first started baking bread regularly (I haven't bought a loaf in nearly 5 years), with yeast, I started reading about sourdough. All the expert, amateur and in-between comments were useful for me to come to my place. I do sourdough baking now, yes, I do use the terms you mention interchangeably. I don't throw away any starter, for example. I just make sure that when I feed it, I will have enough for a recipe (usually 2 loaves) and then only about half a cup so the next time I can just double it without waste. So, you do tweak all these recipes to choose your cooking habits and philosophy and I believe that is how they are meant to be read. I love Reinhart's books but I remember they were very intimidating to me in the beginnng, precisely because I am not a "scientfic cook" , I go by senses than science, eyeball everything rather than be exact. But I can quite see somebody who does like exact measure ments and likes to know the exact science would find his recipes the easiest to begin with....and as for TFL, I have found such a wonderful mx of both kinds of cooks and also people who can break up the scienitific info into terms for people like me and vice versa!
Thankyou for your thoughts. Its funny, actually I am a scientist & I teach engineerng and I believe that one of the most important elements of scientific thinking is to be able to work from what are called in physics "first principles" - or the basic principles - and being able to apply inductive and deductive reasoning to what you do and with experiments. So really its most important to understand what is happening - so this is my approach to baking - So if you understand about fermentation, the interaction of time, and temp , hydration etc... then you have it, so its really an interaction of the sceince and the art of baking ( sounds like a good title for a book :)) - if you play with these elements but alow for some exploratory uncertainty then you are being artistic. The difference between a good cook and someone who cooks is that a good cook understands food, and how foods and spices interact - others just follow recipes but are not "good cooks".
kj
I agree wholeheartedly that "a good cook understands food" and that the fundamentals are the most important. He/she would certainly know how the spices interact or rather the outcome of that interaction but may not be able to delineate the exact chemical changes that happen at the molecular levels. That said, I agree that the art of cooking that devloped over centuries of learning, experiment and accidents suggests that creativie sensibility is required in larger measure than anything else. What I meant about recipes is that none of us want to re-invent the wheel so they provide a useful guidance from which we can figure out some of the basic principles.
I must say though that the reverse of the "good cook" dictum doesn't hold, one can understand and appreciate good food but may not be able to actually cook. As a cook myself, I have come to realise how important this category is. When I see way too many people who cannot understand what 'good' food is, it is disheartening. Complexity of flavors and textures, even being able to tell the freshness of yogurt or milk seems to be a diappearing quality.
I am a teacher too and teach literature and philosophy.
Hello,
In regards to your statements I have a few comments. Yes, all starters, pre-ferments make better bread. However isn't mixing the whole batch of dough and letting it sit a pre-ferment in itself. In Italy many recipes are made with 100% preferment usually biga, then only salt, water, and maybe a little yeast added the next day then mixed briefly. Feel is definately the most important aspect of bread baking because without it you can only copy what others have done. And in regards to many preferments being the same if you further experiment you will notice that each one gives the bread diff. characteristics and more important timing. In a bakery each starter performs different, some give you a spongy texture while others a more open crumb. Try the exact recipe for baguettes one with poolish one with biga and you will have not only two different breads but your folding, proofing,and baking will also vary. I don't claim to know it all but I have experimented thousands of times with almost every combo possible many of them going against the grain of modern baking. In the end you are on the right track keeping an open mind its essential for growth. If your ever in Florida look me up I'm trying to assemble a team for future bakery. Happy baking.
and all the more reason I wish I could go back a few thousand years to see how the ancients discussed this likely item.
Food for thought. Thanks for sharing.
Good question! What is really gained by working in stages instead of just putting everything together and letting it rise, retard, rise, shape, rise, bake...without having to add more ingredients somewhere during the process as you do with a pre-ferment? Perhaps I just need to do my own comparison of the two methods, but I'd be interested in what the more scientific observers have to say about this.
and you will soon learn it's limitations. Yeasts and labs (beasties) have their favorite temps and times and work on the flour differently. You will want to pair the type of flour to the method you like to use. Not all flours work as straight doughs (where everything is put together at once) as compared to multiple build doughs.
By using multiple builds, I've noticed several things are happening. (1) Beasts are fed with fresh flour at each stage, this has a pH influence in relationship to the starter amount and the flour amount. If all the food is fed at once, there will be a long beginning stage until pH is lowered to ideal levels. Not only do the labs and yeasts then work differently, the gluten may weaken before the loaf has produced enough gas to raise it (even if the total hours are the same.) (2) A variety of enzymes are also working in the dough. Some of them we want early on, some of them we don't want until later. By having stages in the recipe, ingredients with spicific time frames can be added or allowed to influence the dough when it is best to do so.
I know, I wish i could be more specific. I hope that made sense.
Mini