April 29, 2014 - 9:05am
salt to retard
I bake in a hot climate, so am often struggling with ways to retard fermentation. I use standard tricks like less innocation, using cold ingredients, fermenting overnight, firmer hydrations, and shoving things in the fridge when needed.
I'm wondering about using salt more strategically. Instead of adding all the salt into the final dough, after all the builds, why not add a strategic proportion of the total salt from the very beginning as one grows the levain?
I never see this mentioned in any discussions or books, so I was curious if anyone else has played around with timing salt with more precision similar to how we use varying rates of inoculation..
Share
This is a common remedy to your problem. Salt your levain by a percentage of the flour in the levain. Be sure to record this and remove from the final dough salt. You'll have to play with what percentage works for your levain and timing. I fortunately live in a very mild climate so don't have the need for this in my levain but I do salt my soakers sometimes to avoid funky smells/flavors.
It is mentioned as an option for both levains and soakers in "Bread" by Jeffery Hamelman. The reason to salt a levain is control fermentation rate while in a soaker it is to suppress fermentation and enzymatic activity we generally don't seek from a soaker.
Josh