May 17, 2020 - 6:39pm
Home milled 100% WW starter and levain
Hello,
I've been baking sourdough the last 3 yrs following the Tartine country loaf method to look after my starter and make my levain - 50% white, 50% wholewheat and 100% water.
I have recently purchased a home mill and would like to transition to a 100% WW starter, and am wondering if I can also get away with a 100% WW levain or if I need to sift out half the bran to mimic the Tartine levain recipe. I'm not sure if this would change the power of the starter/levain or not?
Any ideas from the home millers out there? I'm not married to the method I'm using as it's more of a white bread book rather than whole wheat.
Cheers,
Sam
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I keep my sourdough starter with a mix of 100% wholemeal rye and whole wheat (mostly rye but sometimes I'm too lazy to grind it.)
I do my levain builds with 100% fresh-milled whole wheat hard red.
The only thing to look out for is that the fermentation rate and the enzyme activity are really quick. A few times I built a too-big levain and let it get overripe and the dough started getting gooey and lost gluten strength. Both times I saved it: once with a quick reshape, a very short final proof in a pan, and the other time by making little buns. However, neither was ideal, and I have learned to be more cautious.
If you want to explore 100% whole wheat, both the Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book and the Whole Grain book by Peter Reinhart are good. If you don't mind mixing in a little white flour now and then the King Arthur Whole Grain Baking book is outstanding, and has lots of fun recipes for things like genoise sponge cake and coffee cakes and pastries as well as breads.
I mostly bake from the Laurel's Kitchen book but I adapt the recipes to use an autolyse. The Peter Rinehart overnight levains tended to get proteolytic on me and turn to goo. So that's a thing. Maybe it's just me.
Hey Jess,
Thanks so much for the advice! I feel like a bit of a fledgling at the moment so nice to feel the support of a far flung community.
I have since made some pretty decent loaves with 100% fresh milled WW starter and levain. I'm not sure what type of wheat we have here in Australia but I made it at 95% hydration which I think was a little wet. It's also pretty chilly here atm so having to figure out the right timing for the levain given the fresh milled and 100% WW factors. Such a learning curve!
I have a copy of the Laurels Kitchen bread book, but haven't been sure how to convert the recipes to use starter instead of commercial yeast - do you have a general rule of thumb for this Jess?
Most folks leavening with sourdough use levain at around 15 to 25 percent the weight of the flour. More can be used but it can also cause problems with gluten breakdown. I always shoot for around 20%.
The Laurel's Kitchen recipes often use around 900 grams of flour and 7 grams of yeast for two loaves. To convert to sourdough I combine all the recipe flour with all the recipe liquid (water, milk, syrup) and autolyse at least an hour but ideally overnight.
The next day I spread the dough on the bench, add salt and around 180 grams levain, and knead by hand until fully homogeneous. Then I follow the rest of the recipe. A dough that is supposed to take 1.5 hours for bulk with ADY takes around 3 hours for me with starter.
Ah, that's great! I'll find a recipe and give it a whirl.
Thanks for all your help :-)
I'm be interested to hear which recipe you use and how it goes for you. Keep in mind that her enriched doughs that are meant to rise very high require hard wheat and more kneading. I've been making the Fresh Milk bread lately and it needs about 20 minutes of kneading, first to develop the gluten and then to knead the butter in. You have to do it in that order, as well. If you add the butter at the start the gluten never develops!
I've been feeding my starter fresh milled hard red spring exclusively since I got my mill (13 months.) No discernible change in strength of starter, though it can, indeed, ripen faster than a mix of AP and WW (fresh or otherwise.) I baked loaves yesterday and today using an overnight levain build of 10g starter (~12 hours from last feed) + 120g fresh milled WW + 120g water. In the am (6'ish), the levain had definitely peaked, had a bit of sour to the nose, but worked great to raise my bread. I've recently shortened my bulk (2.5 hours from initial mix until shaping) due to warmer weather, but other than that, my starter seems very happy with its 100% fresh milled wheat diet.
HTH,
Rich
Hey Rich,
Thanks for the advice!
Good to hear your starter quantities for your levain build. Do you use the whole thing in the loaves or do you save some from this as your new starter? I usually make up a batch of 200g water 200g WW and then use 200 for my loaves and save 200 as the new starter mother, but this is from the Tartine book again so not sure if there is a better mother for fresh milled and 100% WW.
Cheers again,
Sam
Sam, I used the whole amount above (240g) in my weekly 2 loaf batch of bread. It's 1190g flour (including the flour in the levain), and 74% hydration. Since I usually keep about 50g of my starter in a jar in the fridge, I just take what I need to build it up to my baking requirements. A typical refresh schedule would be: 5g starter (from fridge) + 5g water + 5g WW flour, leave for 8-12 hours. Remove 10g (discard) and feed 5g water + 5g flour, wait until peaked (for me ~ 4 hours.) Remove 10g, feed 120g water + 120g flour, when peaked (~6 hours) use in dough. .....and, you'll note my final build is 250g, but with some evaporation and loss to mixing, etc., I typically end up with 240g in the dough.
If my fridge starter looks a bit sad (liquid on top, soupy, etc.), then I'll just take it out, keep 10g, feed it 20g water + 20g flour, and if it looks active after 2-4 hours, I'll pop it back in the fridge to wait for when I need it.
That's just the schedule that I arrived at after lots of reading and practice. It seems that there can be a lot of variance in starters and how they react to various feeding schedules, so you might need to experiment a bit with yours. Ultimately, I have found that my starters (I have two) are quite tough little buggers, so it's pretty hard to kill them off unless you leave them in the oven when you are pre-heating it (been there!) :)
R
I home-mill too. WW, especially home-milled, really speeds things up in terms of fermentation. If you feed your starter home milled WW, you will have to feed it more often or at higher ratios. (And if you feed it higher ratios, the yeast/LAB from the newly added WW grain eventually takes over your starter. The flavor and performance will eventually change over time.)
(In order to maintain the flavor profile of the cultures/strains of bugs in my starter, I feed it only store-bought white flour, not store-bought WW, nor home-milled WW.)
With WW: starter growth is faster and Levain build will go faster and Dough fermentation will go faster.
Net: Shelve the Tartine Bread book. Because it is white flour based. Get Tartine Book #3, which is whole grain based. Or, as Jess wrote, Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book, or Reinhart's "Whole Grain Breads. "
One big caveat: If you use fresh home-milled WW, fermentation goes FASTER than the books say. Because the books assume you use store-bought WW which is less "active" than fresh-milled.
One minor quibble: a "faster" starter is a "stronger" starter. So if you want your levain/dough fermenation schedule to remain the same after your switch to home-milled WW (in all three things: starter, levain, dough), you will have to reduce the % amounts of starter and levain in your formulas.
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Two more items. Sifting isn't very efficient or cost effective for home millers, though some do it. Most of us just buy and use various quantities of white flour when we don't want 100% WW bread.
Some home millers sift in order to use the bran to coat the banneton or top of the loaf, or to hydrate the bran separately before adding it back in the dough.
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Ok, one more thing: SeasideJess has probably the best description of how to properly handle home-milled grain that I have seen, wherein he explains how to properly hydrate/autolyse, and the special timing and procedure considerations about when and how to do the stretch and folds during the bulk ferment. The WW bread cookbook authors mentioned above don't adequately explain the differences of how to handle fresh-milled flour versus store-bought WW flour.
I'll search through my bookmarks for a convenient link to one of his good posts/comments, and copy it here.
I don't know where I said helpful things about handling fresh-milled whole wheat. The main thing is, as you've pointed out, the autolyse. And not letting fermentation get out of hand with sourdoughs or pre-ferments.
I don't usually do stretch and folds at all, so maybe that was someone else. I just autolyse, knead, let it bulk, and then do letter folds at the end. I haven't learned to do the high-hydration big-holes sourdough thing. Every time I try, the dough over-ferments and turns to goo. Probably because the recipes are always using high percentage of preferment or long fermentation or both. Because, as you mention, they're not developed wtih fresh-milled wheat in mind.
Maybe I should try a high-hydration sourdough using yeast water to tone the sourdough down and speed up the proof so it will finish before the enzymes get out of hand. Hmm. OK, that's happening. I'm going to autolyse the dough cold in the fridge with cold yeast water and build two levains tonight on the counter: one yeast water and one sourdough. We shall see. Wish me luck.
Oh, I'm a she, not a he.
Happy baking! -Jess
Hey,
Thanks for the advice and taking the time to share your insights. I am looking into getting a copy of Tartine 3 but might just have a play with the Laurels kitchen one first which I have but haven't really explored. I feel like the WW and fresh milled is a realm unto itself! It smells, feels and behaves so differently. It's winter in Australia right now so will be curious about how it is during the summer time - super charged!
I've been experimenting with a 95% WW and 5% sifted loaf at 100% hydration, which has produced pretty good loaves but I feel like I need to bake a bunch to get a feel for the new fresh milled conditions.
Thanks for the hot tip re. using the bran to coat the banneton and pot, works a charm :-)
Have you made post with pictures of your bread and a description of your method? I'd love to see it!