July 7, 2015 - 6:55pm
Starter vs Levain Semantics
I have a quantity of refrigerated liquid sourdough culture which I use to make an intermediate, fresh mixture several hours prior to baking which is then added to the dough.
Semantically, which is the "starter" and which is the "levain"?
I'm thinking the refrigerated culture is the "starter" and the intermediate mixture the "levain". Does this comport with common usage?
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Early on in my sourdough baking (~6 yrs ago), I had the same questions. So for myself, I came up with the following:
The mother or seed is what I keep in the fridge for embellishment to being my pre-ferment or starter.
The seed/mother may be liquid or stiff as may be the the starter/pre-ferment.
I made things as simple as possible for myself, and I believe my terms are self-explanatory should someone else be following my directions.
cheers,
gary
"Mother sponge" has been commonly used to describe the refrigerated "storage" culture, but it wouldn't be appropriate for a liquid culture, just a stiff one.
just means sourdough. pain au levan is sourdough bread. In sourdough bread making using French words for some of the steps in English. I have a SD starter, or seed or mother, that is stored in the fridge. From that I build a larger levain, or preferment, and from that i make the dough. Next thing you know I have some kind of Pain au Levain - Sourdough bread. Nothing like uncommon languages used together to really mess things up!
Farro in Italian can be einkorn, emmer or spelt depending on the size of the grain kernel.
It's all the same. Just fancy/natural/organic yeast. I use direct from the fridge, or bulk-up the fridge stuff when I need more. (which is almost all the time now) if I've any left over because my calculations went wrong, then it just goes back into the fridge to be used tomorrow.
I'm sort of not a fan of the word "sourdough" - would much prefer to call it a natural levain but it seems the word has stuck - and for some, it's a bit off-putting - I've had people not want to buy my bread because they don't like sour things, even though my bread is only mildly sour (most of the time)
-Gordon
Starter = the fermented flour + water that is kept going indefinitely.
Levain = the starter that goes into the recipe i.e the starter that does the leavening.
I sometimes use them interchangeably.
That seems to be the consensus, albeit small.
Confusing as all made out of exactly the same stuff. All flour + water and all preferments.
Preferment is normally used when you take some starter and build it into a levain. But no difference if you take some starter off to build a pre-ferment or feed your actual starter.
We could say a pre-ferment is made to a different flour and hydration to your starter. But starters can be made with different flours and to different hydration and all starters are prefermented.
Just thought I'd add to the confusion. I think it's the difference between a 6 and two 3's.
Here we have a page which refers to the storage leaven and the starter sponge.
http://samartha.net/SD/recipes/SF-01.html
By their terms, the leaven/levain is the refrigerated, stored part, and the starter is made from the stored leaven/levain. The starter is then added to the dough.
It's from Baker's Digest in 1970, so maybe it could be considered definitive?
Now the definitions would read thus:
How do we all like that?
That's how I had thought it.
As in I keep a "stiff Levain" and create a start for the bread i'm about to bake from it by feeding the stiff levain and allowing it to ripen to a ripe levain starter then mixing the dough.
I dunno?