August 1, 2017 - 2:17pm
Merits of High and Low Hydration Starters
While I've had success with both high and low hydration starters with the resulting bread tasting good either way, i was intrigued about what others might think and if there are any strong reasons for one or the other. My main hydration is around 75+% for the dough. I've had a great schooling here in the forum and wish to thank you all.
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I have concluded from my experimentation that one benefit from using a high hydration levain is that you can get more total acidity out of your levain that way. Since LAB replication stops at around a pH of 3.8, you stop getting more bacteria at that point, but total acid production continues. Increasing the hydration provides more water which dilutes the acid. For weak acids (i.e., lactic and acetic), changes in pH have almost no effect on acid concentration and decreasing acid concentration has an equally small effect on pH. This means that you can put all of your liquid into your levain and let it run as long as you have patience, and you will wind up with more total acid than if you use a stiff levain. The hydration of your starter is a somewhat different matter. A very liquid starter seems to grow more rapidly and a stiff starter seems to grow more slowly, though this may be a result of there being less sugar in the same volume of a liquid starter and thus it is depleted sooner, making it appear that the starter is more mature when there is just less of it.