November 11, 2015 - 2:46pm
looking for some help please?
How do i make white starter, not sourdough?
Why do brakerys use ice in the mix when making (dough )bread, is this for the crust (staem in the oven)?
When im going to make my own bread do i experiment with my own formula add the amounts i think should be the right or is there a certain way to follow these procedures?
Thanks
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What do you mean by white starter if not sourdough? Do you mean a pre-ferment using commercial yeast like a poolish, biga, etc?
Ice will slow down the fermentation to allow for more flavors to come out. Usually it is more that the water is iced rather than the ice is added. Usually retarding in a refrigerator is used instead, but not always. Pre-ferments are usually where I see the use of ice water so they can ferment longer.
You can certainly use your own formula, but I would follow some that are already written first so you can get an idea of what you want. The second part would be to play with the amount of water while keeping everything else the same.
The best thing to learn is baker's math. Basically everything is written as a percentage of the flour (so total flour is always adds up to 100%; e.g. 100% AP flour, or 90% AP flour + 10% rye, etc). If you are making a lean dough (meaning only with flour, water, salt, and yeast) then there are some basic suggestions such as salt being between 1.8 and 2.2% of the flour (so if there is 1000g of flour, then 2% salt would be 20g). Here is an example:
French bread:
Total dough weight: ~1004g
Flour - 100% - 600g
Water - 65% - 390g
Salt - 2% - 11.4g
Instant Yeast - 0.55% - 3.3g
This can be done as written or you can take half of it and make a biga, let it ferment, then add the other half of the ingredients. Also, because these are percentages, you can make any amount you want as long as you keep the percentages the same. So you could cut everything in half, or you could decide to use 500g of flour because you are running out or whatever. Then just change everything else to match it (e.g. with flour at 500g, water would now be 500 x 65% = 325g, salt 10g, yeast 2.75g).
Note that this has 65% water compared to flour which is called "hydration". So this bread is 65% hydration which is a good place to start. Changing the amount of water is the first place to experiment. So change to 68%, 70%, or make a ciabatta at 78%. For me, the second place to experiment would be with different pre-ferments. Try a poolish, then biga, then Pâte Fermentée, all using the same basic formula but subtracting the flour and water (and yeast) from the given formula. After that I would play with retarding in the refrigerator (try the bulk ferment vs the shaped loaf for instance and try different times, etc). There are a lot of things you can do with just these 4 ingredients.
Now if you want eggs, milk, oil, etc, then things start to change again.
There is a tutorial on this site on basic bread and it might be worth going through that. Following recipes will also help to try different techniques.
ETA: another place to experiment is with shapes... baguette, boule, batard, rolls, twists, braids, etc. Of course changing the flour or swapping out some of the flour with a different kind is another thing to do. Oh, and learn about resting the dough after mixing the water and flour (no salt or yeast) for an autolyse.
I suggest you ask questions along the way.
By white starter i mean, i visited a company in the usa and they said they mix flour with water 40-60% ratio, and they ferment for 12hrs, i know actual sourdough requires more so i wanted to experiment at home same as the company, i got a chance to ask then about the ice they were like its used in the mix to keep the temp between 70-71f which in turn does not allow the flower to rise on the shaping line.
Also i tried mixing.aome.of there ingredients but they use 845lbs bowls, i dont know how i would follow their formula at home just to experiment as i dont have 845lbs bowls lol
It's either a poolish which is a preferment. Some of the flour and water from the final recipe with a little yeast and left to ferment for 12 hours. Then the final dough is made with the poolish and a little more yeast.
Or it is a sourdough. A sourdough starter takes longer to make but once you have made one all it takes is a feeding a few hours before to bring it back to maturity before using.
We will need a bit more info to establish which method they're using.
You may not have an 845 lb bowl, but you have an 845g bowl (or even a 0.845 lb bowl ... or a 1.69 lb bowl, etc.). The point is that you can scale it down. You are not making 100 loaves. You are making 1 or 2. If you knew how much they put into their mix then you can use the same ratio (or percentages). Instead of using 500 lbs of flour, use 500g or use 0.5 lbs per loaf.
In the USA a starter normally means a sourdough starter, but not always. If they didn't add sourdough to the flour and water then there was probably some yeast. It could be a long auolyse, but I don't think that would be a starter.
Try this:
Take 200g of white flour and mix with 200g of water plus a pinch of yeast. Stir it until there are not dry bits. This is your "starter" which I would call a poolish. Let it sit 12-16 hours.
The next morning, mix the above poolish with an additional:
400g flour
200g water
12g salt
1.5g yeast (about 1/2 tsp) [if using active dry instead of instant, then proof this with the water first]
This is a standard French Bread formula. It makes 1013g (a little over a kilo) of dough.
Maverick
Very good advice.
I just did the math on your standard French Bread formula and even tho I make it in 5 lb batches (about 2280 g) the proportion of ingredients is identical to that. Unfortunately for me, it took years of experimentation to refine it to that. I also use the poolish as you describe (except I use all of the water and an equal amount of flour) and include 10 - 15 % whole grain flour of some sort within the flour total.
Makes very good baguettes and pizza as well as fennel raisin bread, etc. Very flexible base dough. I should have found this forum sooner. Would have saved me a lot of time.
My one concern regards where you say 'Instead of using 500 lbs of flour, use 500g or use 0.5 lbs per loaf.' It seems to imply that 500g equals 0.5 lbs. I'm still pretty new to using metric scales but I think that 1000g is a kilo (about 2.2 lbs), so 500g would be about 1.1 lbs. Maybe you didn't mean to imply that but I think it could potentially be misunderstood as that.
Good job tho. Thanks for the confirmation.
dobie
I did not mean to imply that the 500g was equivalent to 0.5 lbs. Just that you could use percentages to change it to whatever you want. You could use 0.5 lbs flour per loaf, but 500g could be 1 large one or 2 regular ones or 3 (or 4) baguettes, etc. The point is just that you can scale it to be easiest for you. Just like 500 lbs and 500 grams are not the same thing, if you used 500 lbs of flour you could scale it to 500g or even 346g for that matter. As long as you keep the proportions the same that is all that matters for the most part. I use grams because the math is easier.
Maverick
Sorry for the misunderstanding. Everything is clear.
Thanks
dobie
No problem. Like you said, it could have been misinterpreted so clarification may have been needed.
Thanks for clarifying for others. I did not mean to imply that the 500g was equivalent to 0.5 lbs. Just that you could use percentages to change it to whatever you want. You could use 0.5 lbs flour per loaf, but 500g could be 1 large one or 2 regular ones or 3 (or 4) baguettes, etc. The point is just that you can scale it to be easiest for you. Just like 500 lbs and 500 grams are not the same thing, if you used 500 lbs of flour you could scale it to 500g or even 346g for that matter. As long as you keep the proportions the same that is all that matters for the most part. I use grams because the math is easier (plus grams are more precise).
One thing you mentioned is the amount of poolish you are using. The way I always think of a formula is first as a straight dough without any pre-ferment. So without the poolish in the above formula it would be 600g flour, 400g water, 12g salt, 1.5g yeast. Then I play with the percentage of flour I want to put into the pre-ferment. A lot of people just look at the percentage of pre-ferment (including water and yeast, etc), but by saying that there is 33.3% of the flour going into the pre-ferment, I can then change the hydration of the pre-ferment to make a poolish or a biga or sourdough or whatever. Then later I can play with this percentage to see how it changes things (which is where the straight formula with no pre-ferment helps out). Yeast is the only thing that might need to be adjusted with the different pre-ferments.
In your case, 66.67% of your flour is in the preferment. This is twice the amount called for above. It seems like a lot to me, but it is not unreasonable. One really traditional thing to do is use pate fermentee or "old dough". You make up a dough, then hold back some of it as your pre-ferment. I like using 50% pre-ferment flour in this case, but any percentage can be used up to a point. So if you make up 2.5 lbs of dough, after the bulk ferment you refrigerate it and use it as your pre-ferment with another 2.5 lbs of dough to total 5 lbs. In this case even the salt and yeast are included at full strength. What I like is that the pate fermentee can stay in the refrigerator for up to a few days.
Edit: I would of course adjust my total dough weight from 80 ounces to something that would make these numbers more rounded. But I didn't in this case. This is also why I use grams so I don't have to deal with fractions as much.
so they are compensating with ice to make the dough temperature what they want. In our area the tap water temperature is around 50˚F in the winter and in the summer it is in the low 60s so that will make a big difference when mixing a yeast dough. When making the sourdough I think tap water temp has less impact than the air temperature of your kitchen because of the length of time involved.
Gerhard
Gerhard
Along those lines, I remember reading somewhere about a bakery that had a formula that calculated between the flour temperature, water and room temp with the goal of attaining their desired dough temp at mixing and desired proof within their time frame.
Such is the precision of production baking on a schedule.
dobie
Add up all the ingredients of the original recipe. Then divide the weight of the dough you want by weight of the original recipe. Then times each of the ingredients by that number. E.g.
500g flour
300g water
10g salt
150g starter
Total = 960g
However I want a 812g loaf so... 812/960 = 0.8458 (to be accurate go to 4 decimal points) and now times every ingredient by 0.8458
Flour 500g x 0.8458 = 423g
Water 300g x 0.8458 = 254g
Salt 10g x 0.8458 = 8g
Starter 150g x 0.8458 = 127g
[round up or down to the nearest whole number!]
Total = 812g
Yes, using a scale factor like you do works too. I like to at least calculate out the bakers math percentages of the original recipe so that I know the hydration, salt content, etc. so I can make adjustments if I want to. But a straight conversion is very easy your way (especially if you have made the bread before). Good tip.
One thing that I think is important is including the hydration of the pre-ferment being used. For instance with sourdough, some people just say a liquid starter or a firm starter, but those have large ranges. Same as if you just said a biga. Even a poolish is normally 100% hydration but doesn't have to be. That is why knowing the straight dough formula is helpful because then you can use any pre-ferment hydration you want.
A lot of bakeries use formulas to determine their final dough temperature, it is quite common even in small bakeries. We do this every day at the bakery I work at...There are numerous formulas people use but essentially they boil down to taking the flour, air, and sometimes preferment temperatures, calculating how much friction is added during the mixing process and then figuring out what the water temperature needs to be to achieve the desired dough temperature. Ice is simply a way of achieving the desired dough temperature but also in large industrial settings like the one you are speaking of cooling jackets are often used on the mixer that can regulate the dough temperature.
The preferment you are speaking of sounds like a BREW not a poolish. This is not really something that many home bakers know about or have any reason to use...Was this preferment you are speaking of sent through pipes into the mixing bowl or were they manually loading it? If it was sent through pipe it is almost certainly a brew. Industrial bakeries are sometimes equipped with brew systems that mix and hold preferment (temperature regulated) and automatically load them into the mixers. These systems are often attached to the ceilings of the warehouse so that they don't take up floor space and the approximate 40%flour 60%water ratio that you mentioned makes it fluid enough to be sent through pipes(There is also a small portion of industrial yeast in the brew)...It could also be an actual sour culture and there are similar systems that handle sour cultures as well...LaBrea comes to mind as a place that uses a sour system like this...
How would a "brew" differ from a poolish or sponge or other pre-ferment? Or is it just that it is at 150% hydration which is wetter than typical? Are there other things added such as oxidizers, etc.? I am not familiar with the term so I am interested to learn more.
Yes the company does have the starter coming out from pipes, and what is brew? is this cheaper for companies to do this then make actual starter?