March 12, 2016 - 2:26pm
Using starter vs building a leaven
What impact does building a leaven from your starter have when making a loaf as opposed to building your loaf using an active starter? i guess all I can think of is it changes the flavour profile if you use a small portion of your starter to seed a leaven and use it quite early but you can do the same thing with your starter so why the process of building a leaven unless you want to build a specific one for a specific bread?
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Hopefully that makes sense it's just something I'm trying to get my head around
I'm going to guess that you're referring to recipes that specify the process of building a starter (like, "build the levain in step 1, 2, 3). I honestly don't know of any other than two reasons for including those steps in a recipe:
1. You want to build a leaven with ratios/ingredients that aren't used for feeding the regular starter
2. Making sure that people understand what they need to do to get a similar result
Maybe I'm not being imaginative enough, but I don't think there's more to it...
I have been making bread from a starter I made from scratch a couple months ago. I've never thrown any away. I bake about every two to three days. I never refrigerate my starter. I use the old Oster bread machine to mix the dough. After I remove the paddle I plop the dough back in the pan and let it rise in the big oven with just the light on. When it has doubled, or I'm tired of waiting, I put it back in the machine and set it to bake only. Good enough sourdough bread without commercial yeast every time.
I think that it would develope more flavor if I proofed it overnight but how could it rise after it has been in the fridge all night? Other than being cold, wouldn't it have used up all of its oomph and have nothing left? That's where I thought the leven came in. You proof your leven overnight and after an hour or so out of the fridge add the rest of the recipe and mix it up then let that rise? I wonder?
we try to keep things simple :) we have one bucket with one leaven/starter, we build directly in the bucket and use directly from the bucket and just make sure we leave some at the bottom. The day before mix day we give it 3 or so feeds and one at 3am on the day to keep it fresh tasting and lively. we build from about 3.5kg (including the weight of the bucket) to about 13kg all up.
I find more mature leaven makes for more sour flavour and it tends to cover the more buttery flavours, also we find bulking at warmer temps or over bulking tends to give more sourness.
Do you build on stages simply because it's such a large amount? Or would you do the same if building a smaller amount?
The bottom line for us is flavour, secondly; convenience (making it practical), and customers getting a consistent and desirable product that they wnt to eat every day.
We have so many people saying that most sourdough theyve tried is too sour. Personally I dont mind a good, well fermented sweet/sour tasting, heavy german rye :) but to have the full variety and introduce people who would like to be healthier but are used to their cruddy supermarket sliced white for example, you need something that is delicious and not too confronting in flavour...
If I was making just for us; we keep our leaven in the fridge, so if I want to make bread every 2 days lets say, and I have about a cup full sitting there, chances are it'll be quite strong flavoured and well beyond peak. So for me to make 2 loaves and have some left Id have to build it anyway, and I like to use it when it near peak, before or after.
oopssorry about the double post must have hit save twice :/
Soooo helpful!
The bottom line for us is flavour, secondly; convenience (making it practical), and customers getting a consistent and desirable product that they wnt to eat every day.
We have so many people saying that most sourdough theyve tried is too sour. Personally I dont mind a good, well fermented sweet/sour tasting, heavy german rye :) but to have the full variety and introduce people who would like to be healthier but are used to their cruddy supermarket sliced white for example, you need something that is delicious and not too confronting in flavour...
If I was making just for us; we keep our leaven in the fridge, so if I want to make bread every 2 days lets say, and I have about a cup full sitting there, chances are it'll be quite strong flavoured and well beyond peak. So for me to make 2 loaves and have some left Id have to build it anyway, and I like to use it when it near peak, before or after.
but would you build in stages, lets say you needed 200g of leaven would you still do three feeds to reach that or just take 25g from the fridge and then add the required water and flour to reach the amount you need in one go?
its hard for me to imagine only needing 200g! but ok, if I knew I could get the amount I needed in a short time easily from the amount I had in one feed - adding the full flour and water to it in one go and the timing being right - why not?
I really dont think it NEEDS to be dont in bits or stages, its just that perhaps its more gauge-able, controllable or perhaps fit into peoples routines, meaning the can calculate more closely when it will be ready.
Its not absolute, it can be as complex or simple as you like, its only bread after all :) If you can do it on one hit and youre happy with it, why not.
Very little difference. I use starter directly from the fridge and starter (levian, call it what you want) made from taking the stuff in the fridge and bulking it up with flour + water then leaving it a few hours.
The fridges stuff does take a little longer to ferment the dough, but that's about all. If anything I think the levian (bulked up starter) makes the bread more sour, but I find it hard to tell.
for a few years I was making breads with the starter directly from the fridge then as quantities increased I needed to start making up the levian. I did at one point toy with the idea of just having a big bucket, but quantities are variable every day and on the 2 days I don't bake bread I'd want to fridge it, so from a management point of view this process works for me.
Right now the only time I'm using directly from the fridge is spelt - for up to 4 loaves. Any more than 4 then I need to bulk it up. (That's usually for my Saturday bake when I make 6 or more)
-Gordon
Yeh, Im not sure theres a right way, its a matter of finding what works really.
Our bucket lives always in the fridge, we feed and put directly back in the fridge - apart from the very first feed when its been sitting for 1 or 2 days and it needs a kick start. I guess we get temps up to 36C at the moments with high humidity and if we left it out it would accelerate way to quickly, we'll have to adjust when winter comes.
Sometimes if we're going to be home for the day and have run out of bread just for us we do a "same day sourdough"....
Build early-leave out, mix mid to late morning, bulk til early afternoon with folds, shape and proof til late afternoon/early evening, then bake - this is all out of the fridge.
Perfectly do-able if it works for you :)
I think we might use a fair bit of leaven per amount of dough too?
Most of my doughs have 30% levian/starter in them...
-Gordon
As a percentage of dry flour, ours is around 40% (745g flour - 305g leaven)
IMHO sourdough bakers fall into two roughly defined designations. The Engineer Bakers like very precise weights and measurements. They enjoy the depth and character of the recipe. They delight in extra steps that are designed to encourage flavor, rise, shape and crust. The second type is the Hippie Baker. Hippie Bakers yearn for the days of our ancestors and delight in digging their hands in to judge a recipe by it's feel, smell, taste and ease of use. They don't have time for all of this weighing, measuring, and making leaven. They believe in mixing up and letting it hang out until it smells right, then mixing up a loaf.
To be honest, I've made my bread both ways and really don't notice much difference if I make a leaven first or just mix that whole puppy together and bake. I say do it whichever way makes you happy. Happy bakers make better bread.
I happily do both methods too but when consistency is needed getting nerdy helps :)
I weigh/measure with care and have a defined "process" for my breads - the craft part is the shaping and final bake. That can and does vary from day to day... However I don't care much for my ancestors or "traditional" breads and so on other than learning from their mistakes. (e.g. my Borodinsky may not be GOST, but I really don't give a fermented dingoes kidney) Contemporary craft bread engineer here... :-)
-Gordon
ahahaaaa funny :) , actually we have one customer whos french and she says her mother back in the day - alongside all the romance of french bread - said it was horrible! In al lot of places they only baked their white dry french style once a week and by the end it was like eating a door mat!
depends on how much starter you have, how much levain you are making and what you are trying to accomplish. At the end of 24 weeks un-maintained in the fridge, I might only have 10 g, or even less, of my stiff rye starter. At that point I might want to bake 1,800 g loaf of 100% whole grain rye bread at 80% hydration using 20% prefermented flour and replenish my 120 g of stored stiff rye starter at the same time.
I would need to end up with 720 g of levain at 100% hydration for the bread (360 g each rye flour and water) and 72 g of rye flour and 48 g of water for the 66% hydration starter. So that's 432 g id flour and 408 g oif water. No worries - this is something I have to do every 24 weeks
If I took my 10 g of remaining starter and dumped 442 g oif flour and 48 g of water on it at one time I would have a disaster. There would be so much wild yeast and LAB in the flour hey would overwhelm the poor 10 g of starter and it would be like starting a new rye starter from scratch in the worst way possible.
But if break it up into 4 progressively larger feedings of 4 hours each then there is no worries at all and in 16 hours I have enough levain at its peek for the bread and enough starter in 13 hours ready for retarding for 24 weeks. All you have to do is use the rule of 15 (four feedings where you start with 1 part flour and double it each feeding .... so 1 +2 +4+ 8 = 15)
If you take the 432 g of flour, less the 6 g in the 10 g of 66% starter, and divide 426 g by 15 and you get the flour required for the first feeding = 28.4 g of flour and water. The 2nd feeding is twice that or 56.4 g of flour and the 3rd is double the 2nd or 113.6 g with the last feeding being doubled again or 227.2 g added together is 426 g of flour.
So even if I was making (2) 900 g loaves and using my normal 10 g of starter I would still use 4 progressively larger builds of 4 hours each to make the levain so that I could have it ready peking in 16 hours rather than the minimum 4 days I would be doing by dumping all that flour in there and basically beginning a new starter.
You have to fit what you are doing with what you have at hand. Since I hardly ever use more than 5 g starter to build 120 g of levain, I am always doping at least 2 builds but usually its 3.
holy! taking complicated to a whole new level! :) I see youre the engineer type :)
One starter/leaven/levain/mother or whatever else youd like to cal it, in one bucket used 3 times a week to make 9 varieties of bread- around 180 loaves all up, every week... and growing!
See, we dont have a separate starter that we dont use often or at all, just the one thats mixed and refreshed each time.
Keeps it simple, we're half Hippie and half Engineer, best of both worlds :)
every day, using one starter - I wouldn't keep one. I might use 'old dough' like Boudin does instead and forget the starter maintenance thing altogether. But, t would be impossible to make a 100% rye or spelt bread using a white starter..... I'm too lazy for all that work either way though:-) I want to build a starter to be as sour as possible and then not maintain it for 24 weeks - letting it get more sour in the fridge as time goes on The I can take a very small amount of it small amount of it to make 1 loaf of bread a week. It really takes 5 days to make starting with sprouting the grain on Monday, then drying it adn then grinding it and then sifting it and finally doing the levain build for a Friday bake. Being retired, I have plenty of time to make a loaf a bread the slow food way so I do with no need to bake a load of bread every day to sell.
So the method, as usual, is dependent on the the goal, on what you are tying to accomplish and how fast you need to get it done. Stil, when you refresh, you have to figure out how much flour and water to add to the starter, mix it up and then let it mature some amount of time before using it. - which is exactly what everyone else does too - one way or another. I just can't dump it all in at once on top of a tiny bit of left over rye starter and expect to be at its peak in 12 hours - it would take at least 4-5 days and I would end up with a new starter every time. That is the price I pay for being lazy and not wanting to maintain a starter at all for 24 days at a time :-)'
Those of us that do 3 stage levain building know the rule of 7 well.....to make figuring out the build sizes easy as pie - not complicated at all. I probably learned it here from another Fresh Lofian or Lucy made it up - one or the other:-)
I started out as a structural engineering student but found it a bit boring so switched over to Architecture after a couple of years to get the best and worst of both worlds!
Happy baking
What's the rule of 7?
flour and water the first feeding of the 3 stage 100% hydratoon levain build will be knowing 3 things - how much dough you want to make how much pre-fermented flour you want to use in that dough and thehydration of the final dough. Example
The first feeding is 1 part flour and the same weight in water. the 2nd feeding is 2 parts and the 3rd feeding is 4 parts with each feeding twice amoiunt as the one before - 4 hours apart. The 7 comes from 1+2+4 = 7
So if you want to make 2,000 g of dough at 75% hydration with 15% pre-fermented four in the mix then 2000/1.75 (100% for flour and 75% for hydration) = 1443 g of flour in the final dough and you want 15% of that flour to be in the levani as a pre-ferment so 1443 * .15 = 216 g of flour required in the levain.
Now you take the 216 g and apply the rule of 7..... 216/7 = 30.85 g of flour, say 31 g, is required for the first levain build. The 2nd requires twice as much or 62 g and the 3rd feeding is twice as much again or 124 g with equal amounts of water for each feeding. 31 + 62 +124 = 217 g of flour and the levain would weigh a total of 434 g plus the seed starter amount that I usually make equal to the first flour feeding - in this case 31 g of starter required - so the entire levain would weigh 434 +31 = 465 g at 100% hydration .... 12 hours from the beginning.
Knowing the rule of 7, you can convert any recipe to a 3 stage levain build or you can make up any recipe you desire using a 3 stage levain build. I also use the principle to do other kinds of builds like the rule of 15 or even a 9.275 :-)
It is pretty tough to figure out the famous 3 stage Detmolder build without knowing the rule of 7.
Happy Levain building
...this hippie baker just crawled under the table to hide after reading that. I'm gong to go toss a handful of rye flour into my big bowl of starter just to make myself feel better.
totally!
I can't remember any of it for some reason:-)
What's the reason for building in three stages as opposed to just taking 50g of starter, adding 200g of flour the same of water and just wanting until it's active?
Just so you know, there are no hard and fast rules here, if you feed in 2 or 4 and get the same result/the result you want it doesnt matter
with 50 g of starter and don't even have that much total in the fridge most of the time!. I usually start my levains with 5-10 g of rye starter max and dumping that much rye flour on it would just kill it off and the bad wee beasties in the flour would take over for 3-4 days because the pH would be too ow for too long. I rarely have more than 60 g of flour in the levian for a 1,000g bread - the total levain only weighs 125g . Slow is best for SD flavor and that much levain would produce a far inferior bread if I used it so I would just throw most of it away.
So you're leavening a kilo of dough with 120g of starter?
hydration, they are usually a 50% whole grain with half sprouted, so it would have 555 g of four in it. My levain is built to 100% hydration so 120 g has 60 g of flour in it, 60/555 = 10.8 pre-fermented flour. I shoot for between 8 -15% of pre-fermented flour in the levain depending on the time of year. 8% in the summer and 15% in the winter. We are amost 90 F here in the day time in AZ now so I'm using about 11% for the late spring.
This lower amount means it takes more time for ferment and proof and more times means more flavor when it comes to SD. I also like to do 18-24 hour shaped retards and if I use more levain it over proofs in the fridge and I have to reshape it the next day and let it proof again which really hurts the open crumb I am looking for.
Happy baking
hydration, they are usually a 50% whole grain with half sprouted, so it would have 555 g of four in it. My levain is built to 100% hydration so 120 g has 60 g of flour in it, 60/555 = 10.8 pre-fermented flour. I shoot for between 8 -15% of pre-fermented flour in the levain depending on the time of year. 8% in the summer and 15% in the winter. We are almost 90 F here in the day time in AZ now so I'm using about 11% for the late spring.
This lower amount means it takes more time for ferment and proof and more times means more flavor when it comes to SD. I also like to do 18-24 hour shaped retards and if I use more levain it over proofs in the fridge and I have to reshape it the next day and let it proof again which really hurts the open crumb I am looking for.
Happy baking
so can I do the same thing while keeping the sour flavour down? What I mean is, can I build a stiff starter that will last me for several weeks in the fridge where I just take 10 grams or so to build it up for bread just like you do but minimize the sour flavour?
the post for No Muss No Fuss Starter
You won't likely be able to keep it for 24 weeks in the fridge like a rye starter but I have kept a white one for 12 weeks that way. The most important things to make a sour starter, levain and bread in order are: Whole grains (rye is best), High temperature (92-94 F best), high hydration (100-120 % best). So using white flour, at room or lower temperature at 66% hydration for building starters, levain and dough or starter storage at 36 F won't make much sour.
Happy baking
Thank you!
`Yeh I can relate, I wanted to do architecture :)
There wasn't any money in it The money was all in the land and the buildings so it was much better to be a design build general contractor and a developer.and hire out the required engineers and architects. I love design and built a lot of buildings all over the world. Now that I am retired, I am doing tiny houses just for fun and to stay busy If I was younger, I would buy a big plot of land and build a whole city of them:-) With few good paying jobs, many young people don't want or can't afford a regular house and many don't want to be tied down to one either. The problem you have to fight through is the local governing codes, general plan, zoning restriction, building codes and restrictive covenants that don't allow a tiny house to be built in their jurisdiction. It is hard ti change the way people think and see the future..
I remember when I got out of Architectural School the AIA would not allow any General Contractors to be a member of their august body even if they had all the educational and and post educational training and passed the test. The powers at bay thought that Architects were supposed to be there to make sure the GC toed the line and built things right, according to the drawings with no short cuts and it would be conflict of interest for an Architect to be a GC. It never occurred to them that the best GC's should be Architects and the other way around.like they do today - but it took a long time for them to come around.
I love the idea of tiny houses. My problem is, I'd have to have a big kitchen with a tiny house designed around it!
One big kitchen surrounded by more kitchen disguised as a TV, hide away bed, shower and toilet:-) You would love it.