January 25, 2014 - 4:34am
Percentage of Levain in a dough? Is their a fixed number?
How do people determine the percentage of levain in a recipe?
Is their a set percentage (or standard number) that you should go by?
So many recipes that I look at their is always a different percentage of levain added to the dough.
Thanks!
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I would post this in the sourdough section to get their ideas, but as far as I know, there is no set formula, it all depends on time. For example, TXCraig1, a poster on pizzamaking.com has made up a chart showing the relationship between time, temperature and levian - it shows if you use a 1% levian at 55 degrees, it will take 123 hours to ferment, or you can use a 20% levian at 80 degrees and it will ferment in 7 hours.
Can you get me that link? I would like to see it.
Thanks.
viewing levain as an extra "ingredient", it is, after all, just more flour and water only inoculated with certain bacteria. Plus, not every levain is created equal, for example using 200 grams of 50% hydration levain will have a different effect than using one that has 100% hydration.
What you should draw your attention to is how much flour are you prefermenting. That way there is less ambiguity about different hydrations and altogether the taxonomy of baking is made much the simpler for it. Note that is such a case you should not consider flour in soakers and long-autolyses prefermented, though they, in a sense, are.
I generally use 20% prefermented flour in a mostly-wheat sourdough formula where there's no cold retardation. If I were to retard the loaves, I'd probably put only 10-15% prefermented flour in the formula, depending on how long the retardation will go on (after all there's some difference in "overnight" ~ 12 h and the full 24 h). In a lot of rye bread recipes there is a greater amount of flour prefermented, because it benefits from being soured, for example, Hamelman's 40% rye, where the whole 40% rye flour that is in the formula is prefermented.
The numbers above work for me, but they aren't part some universal law of levain -- lots of people preferment a lot of their flour and shorten the bulk fermentation and proof, for example, some of Reinhart's sourdough formulas use an obscene amount of starter, but bulk and proof is done pretty quickly.
On the other hand, you can preferment 5% of your flour, put the Lord of the Rings trilogy on, and when you're done the bulk ferment will likely be nearing the end as well. It all depends in baking.
This is one of Txcraig's tables http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php?topic=22649.0