Too Much Starter?
Need some advice please. I printed out a recipe for Basic White Sourdough Bread, I think from this site, but not sure at this point. It calls for 16 oz of starter and this seems like a lot to me. I'm wondering if it is a misprint. My starter is PR mother starter, 100% hydration. I will refresh it with same before this bread. I've made a number of his breads with it, very good results.
This new recipe is as follows: 100% hydration sourdough starter-16oz/453g, 18 oz/510g water, 32 oz/907g bread flour, .5oz/14g oil, .5oz/14g sugar and .8/22g sea salt. Does use the autolyse and some stretch and fold. It makes 4 lbs 4 oz of dough. It seems like a lot of starter, 3 cups. Way more than PR recipes. Any thoughts to help me?
Thanks in advance, am loving all your great opinions. Jean P. (VA)
453g of 100% hydration starter (226,5g flour) and 907g of bread flour add to a total amount of 1133,5g flour.
226,5g / 1113,5g = 0,2 = 20%.
So the recipe uses 20 percent of pre-fermented flour. That seems to be a reasonable amount (white wheat sourdough breads often have about 15-20% pre-fermented flour).
In some books the recipes include an additional formula for creating the final sourdough portion. So it may call fo 50g of starter and you feed it according to the recipe to produce 300g of it. In other books the repices might omit this step and just call for a certain amount of already refreshed sourdough and you have to decide how to produce this amount. So that may also cause some confusion.