finger sandwiches using pains au levain

Have you ever make a quiche?  It is like that.   Generally I find medium heat (ie, 180C / 350F) is plenty hot enough for this type of baking where, if it is a big one, the egg and milk/cream mixture may need a longer time to set in the oven.   You bake until you see the centre has slightly risen up, signifying even the centre has set.   With a medium size quiche bakeware (like a cake tin) it will take roughly 40 to 45 minutes, but you need to watch.

This is the same if you do a sweet version of it; ie, the bread and butter pudding where you can also be inventive by throwing in any fruit you fancy into the bake in addition to the bread, be it banana, apple, pear or any other fruit, but in general, soft fruit is better than hard fruit (pre-cooking the hard fruit like apple in butter and cinnamon and nutmeg would be good).

Ice should be on its way?  Sounds wonderful.   Wish we had 4 seasons.  (Years ago when we lived in Singapore, the locals there used to say to me they had 4 seasons - hot, hotter, wet and wetter!)

No, I would never cater.  I cannot work under stress.

We used to entertain a lot at home and I used to love to cook for that.   But now we enjoy small gatherings rather than big parties.  When I first came to Australia more than 20 years ago, people entertained mostly at home, and then when eating out became more affordable, people would meet at restaurants.  A girl friend told me recently that the trend is now switched back to entertaining at home, or very little entertaining at all as I see it (less and less human contact due to world wide web?).  Food for thought.  My laptop is now 5 years old; somebody told me laptop should be replaced, upgraded so to speak, every couple of years.  Now that I am not working, I see no reason why my laptop or my mobile should be "upgraded."  I am very happy with my "old" technology.  

... so I went to Amazon.com to listen to a sample.  No, I don't think that I like that song as much as this one called "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" by Cyndi Lauper.  In the 80's when I was studying this song was very popular, and how appropriate it is included in an album called "NOW That's What I Called The '80s!"

You made beautiful breads yourself.  I especially like your Pain au levain with whole wheat (Hamelman, "Bread" p. 160) and wanted to ask you a question about it but just haven't got around to it.  I love your Sourdough Seeds Bread too. You made one of the nicest seeds breads that I've ever seen.

You have asked a question that I myself have been fascinated by since I started making sourdough breads.  I am not a person who loves theory (Chinese people rarely do); when it comes to bread, my approach tends to be more practical.  I want to know the reason behind why certain things happen the certain why, and I can be quite thorough about it.   But that's about all. 

The question you asked is why I used equal amounts of starter and final dough flour.  I first began this ratio in my Sourdough 50/50 post (I view starter the same as other pre-ferments, ie, poolish, biga, sponge and mother dough.)  At the time I did a study to see what the usual percentages of pre-ferments were vis-à-vis final dough flour.  In that post I ended up using 50% starter and 50% poolish, totaling 100% final dough flour.  In my research I found it is quite common for poolish to be 100% flour (for instance in ciabatta) and very common for total pre-ferments to be far higher than 100% flour; for example, SFBI has a Semolina Durum Crowns formula where sponge and poolish together are 230% of flour!  Also, I did a Miche where the starter was 230% of final dough flour too.   That was also an SFBI formula.  If you read the procedure in that Miche post very carefully you will find something very interesting:

• Firstly, the bulk fermentation was only 30 minutes;
• Secondly, there was no proofing (or second fermentation) because the normal proofing was replaced by "proofing retarding" in the refrigerator at 8 - 9C/46 - 58 F (different temperature from our home refrigerator).  And,
• Thirdly, because of the high percentage of pre-ferments in this bread, and also because of the type of pre-ferments (ie, starter, as opposed to just poolish or other pre-ferments), this bread is the sourest of all the breads that I have ever made.  If the pre-ferments had been, say, a poolish, where the hydration is 100% or more, the bread would not have tasted so sour.

The rule of thumb is if you have a very large portion of pre-ferments, retarding is not recommended (otherwise your flour will have been fermented too long and there is a danger of gluten breaking down because of the amylase activity), unless your bulk and proofing times are very short. 

When we do a sourdough bread (a pain le levain), the rule of thumb of starter to final dough flour percentage is 25 to 35% (at most 40%).  Of course it can be done with less starter, and the famous examples among TFL bakers are Susan from San Diego who made beautiful sourdough breads with as little starter as 4.8 - 5% as in here and here, although her beautiful recent bakes were higher at 16.7%, still low compared to the norm.

So, my point is, anything is possible, depending on how you care for your dough once the final dough is mixed. As Sourdough 50/50 worked for me, when I was doing the next bread (My Imitation of Chad Robertson's Country Sourdough), I started to do 100% starter to final dough flour .  My thinking was to have maximum natural yeast presence before I started my dough process in order for

1. maximum open crumb and
2. maximum flavor from just pure flour. 

So far this approach has worked for me.  There is a danger of over-fermenting the dough, and so I have to be careful of my proofing.  It's a constant adjusting process with different room temperatures due to seasonal changes and new add-ins that I am forever experimenting.  On the other hand, while this percentage may seem high, on a total flour basis, the total pre-fermented flour to total flour is 36%, the average being 12.5 to 16.7%.  The highest I have ever seen is SFBI's Caramelized Hazelnuts Bread (in Michel Suas's Advanced Bread and Pastry), and that is 58% (where the pre-ferments to final dough flour was 250%)!

Hope this answers your question.