ABOUT FEEDING STARTER AND MAKING A LEVAIN
Dear bakers. I want to understand deeply about why there are different types of feedings.
I use a liquid sd starter and here in Italy there 's the common feeding 1:1:1(starter,water,flour) and as I can see in Tartine recipe ... they feed starter 1:2:2. Adding more flour and water what are the main differences?
I normally feed my starter with 50 percent organic wholewheat and 50 percent bread flour and it is controlled in acidity have a goodand varied smell but it lightly lacks in activity when I add it in the dough ( about 20 percent).
1.I made it two months ago and maybe the main reason is that it isn't rich enough in bacterias and levures.. do you know some tecnics to give more activity or I have to wait and continue to feed it meticulously?
2.About the levain or preferment or a poolish.. I searched that it gaves more fragrancy, controls the acidity and gives more activity to the bacterias when it ' s done well. Are there other reasons that differences levain to starter?
3.Is it correct feeding the starter or make a levain with a part of the main flour that we are going to use in the dough? I saw recipes of rye breads or semola breads where levain is feeded with a part of rye or semola. If it is correct which is the reason we do so?
Sorry for my english and the confused questions... but I would like to truly understand the bases of making bread knowing what I am doing . Thank you!
A starter to feed ratio laid out in this formula, for example, of 1:1:1 that the sequence is starter:water:flour
Just to avoid confusion and no mistakes are made. Some might not go into so much detail and just give a formula but it'll be in this sequence. Fine when it says 1:1:1 if you should get it mixed up but if you see 1:4:5 and you mix the order up the results will be very different.
Thank you I edited
The way how you keep and use a starter is dictated very much by your baking needs and whether you keep a starter purely as a seed and make an off-shoot starter (a levain) from that. Or whether you use it as a production starter as well.
Since a starter and levain are very much the same thing, prefermented flour and water, you'll find recipes and methods using starter or a levain to make bread. Why one or the other?
If you keep one starter to make many different types of bread you may wish to build levains that suit the bread being made.
If you're a baker with many different types of starters then there will be no need to "turn" a bit of some starter into a levain for the bread being made. Feed the starter intended for the bread being made and use it in the recipe.
Should the amount of starter/levain be a small percentage you might not be too concerned it doesn't "fit" the bread being made. So there are a few grams of rye flour within the starter being used for a bread flour sourdough, it's only a small amount!
When you're following a recipe the baker doesn't know what type of starter you have and there will be many people following the same recipe so a levain is built as recommended for the recipe.
So you see there are many reasons to use one or the other.