March 11, 2021 - 4:08pm
Newbie type question about levain
Hi there! For sourdough recipes that call for a levain, are you using starter straight from the fridge that hasn't been built? So the levain is essentially the build? Thanks if anyone can clarify that for me. I've only done basic recipes where i use a starter that i have fed and doubled then just mix it all in with salt , flour and water . One step recipes. Those simple recipes seem to have served me well, turns out delicious bread every time but I'm trying to learn more complex recipes.
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For a levain I use starter straight from the fridge. I know some people like to feed a few times before moving onto the levain but for myself one build works just fine. If you think about it the levain is the first build and the final dough the second!
If simple works and has perfect results then why go more complicated to get the same result? Just because? Bread baking isn't supposed to be complicated. I prefer to not spend all my time feeding a starter. Starter is just that... Starter! The whole point of a starter is so that you don't have to go through a complicated rigmarole every time you wish to bake.
I agree 100%. The only time I do multiple builds is when I’m making a rye or WW starter from my Ap mother starter.
and why do you to multiple builds for rye and WW? Oh is it because you want to get the loaf as close to 100% rye or ww as possible
Since I start with a mostly white/AP starter it’s usually necessary to do at least 2 builds to convert it to rye or whole wheat or it is not strong enough.
Thanks for your input about the levain. wasnt sure if straight from fridge was strong enough. (it's regularly fed so i guess it won't be an issue)
I was thinking the exact same thing (why get complicated) , except some of these yummy looking breads on this forum are more complicated than the ones from my basic sourdough book. And i wonder if complicated will get better or different results. My book has quite a few base recipes that i can substitute inclusions /grains or change hydration and some recipes use different grains too. So i feel for now that's all i need. But i'm tempted to try some recipes on the forum
And keep it simple? A lot of times people over complicate things. When a recipe asks for 100g active AP levain at 100% hydration then build one and you're ready to go. You don't need to spend days prior to that feeding it. As long as it's active and built to requirements it's fine.
Some recipes play around with the fine tuning of building a predominantly yeasty or lactic acid starter/levain. Using flour, temps, hydration and specially timed feedings. But that's another story and I think touching on what Ian was referring too. Rye recipes have these stages often built into the recipe. But the vast majority of what breads just require a levain that is active and ready to go. One doesn't need to spend days feeding a starter even before starting the levain.
Let's just say that a starters strengths varies greatly and an adequate starter can make a lot of adequate breads. However if you are asking the starter to make a bread that asks for a strong starter such as a Tartine, Fullproof Baking open crumb bread then it helps to have a strong starter. The same goes for Panetone and other enriched breads where a levito madre high maintenance stiff starter is required.
So what does a strong starter look like? It doubles and triples and matures quickly. When mine is robust it is not soupy or loose but strong, holds together well and floats high in the water. When it is used in the dough it makes a bread with more volume.
Mine spends most of it's life in the fridge and I bake once a week but after two or three room temp feeds it is much stronger. I hate the waste of high maintenance but a few extra elaborations does make a difference for the kinds of bread I like to make. Plus there's pancakes and waffles. I am a believer that you get out of your starter what you put into it. You just need to decide what works best for you.
Even a few weeks in the fridge I can make bread with my starter with no levain and a very small percentage of starter. If I do build a levain it springs to life and behaves as you describe a strong starter should. But as you say it all depends on your starter. A levain also allows one to judge the strength before going into the final dough so of course one can adjust should one need to which is easier at the levain stage. There's also learning how your starter behaves and you know it's capabilities. So while I advocate a less fuss approach there's always a need for some experience and if need be slight adjustments. So I suppose if starting off it pays to put in that little something extra for assurance.
When we say starter, we mean "yeast". Yeast can be commercial, baker's yeast, or wild yeast. In starter we care only about yeast growth, so that we can have enough yeast for our dough to rise. We feed starter to make yeast grow.
In one step methods we can add a little or a lot of commercial yeast to flour and make bread. Or we can add a little or a lot of wild yeast, in form of starter, and make bread, as you've ben doing so far.
When we say levain, or leaven , we talk about part of the bread dough, a preferment.
This preferment can be leavened by commercial yeast or by wild yeast. Most importantly, it is created to improve bread dough, so we ferment it to modify flour, or to improve gluten, to accumulate flavors, etc. We don't care about conditions for yeast growth here. That we did when we propagated yeast cells inside the starter.
Can you use you starter instead of levain in a recipe? Well, yes, if your starter has all qualities of a good bread d o u g h and will not spoil your bread dough: if its flavor is right, if its gluten structure is good, if there is enough yeast cells in it and they are very active, etc. I doubt though that a starter straight from the fridge has yeast cells at their highest gassing power, because when cold they are lethargic and need to be activated first.
I keep my starter in the fridge and typically feed it once per week only. I bake once or twice per week. Each time I bake a remove the amount of starter I need and directly build the levain from it, cold without a refresh. My starter is a whole rye 100% hydration starter. Since the switch last year to whole rye, my levains typically will rise 3-4 times volume at peak. I haven’t found there to be much reason to do more complex levain builds, two or three stages unless I just need more levain than I have.
What’s the difference between poolish and levain?
A poolish is a pre-ferment with baker's yeast.
A levain is a pre-ferment with sourdough starter.
Poolish was a technique developed when baker's yeast became more popular to replicate some of the properties of sourdough.
Don't get caught up too much in terminology. As long as you understand the technique. Terminology will mean slightly different things to different people. There are a lot of overlaps too with everyone thinking their own understanding is the only true meaning. Some people think of a levain only in sourdough terms and poolish in yeasted terms. Yet others might refer to a poolish as simply a pre-ferment or levain to simply mean pre-ferment. Don't get too bogged down. On this site when you see the word levain it's commonly understood as a pre-ferment with starter. And poolish as a pre-ferment with yeast.
levain starter in their pain rustique "poolish". Considering their stature and skills, I'm not the one to tell them that using a levain as the seed instead of a yeast is wrong.
And while it is common, and methinks good, practice to stick to a universal nomenclature, that isn't likely to happen.
Agreed that poolish and levain generally mean unique things, constructed in unique manner, the lines can be slipped across. And while I prefer to keep to my side of the center line, it isn't a bad thing to peek at what's on the other side of it either.
Another note is the distinction between poolish and you're not-yet-asked-about biga. Poolish as mentioned is more liquid and bigas can range from stiff to downright near-concrete. Poolish are frequently called for when one looks for extensibility and a biga is a more suitable candidate for dough strength - to my understanding.
Agree with Abe - don't get too caught up in terminology. Rather concentrate on technique and understanding what these components lend to breads that you wish to make.
Levain is a broad term for many types of preferments made both with wild yeast or baker's yeast.
Levain is a French word for "preferment", something we do when we make bread dough in stages, not in one step. When it is made with wild yeast, it is called levain naturel (natural leaven), when levain is made with baker's yeast it is called levain levure (yeasted leaven).
Poolish is one kind of levain made with bakers's yeast. It is liquid, and it is always made with wheat flour, and it is never made with wild yeast.
It appears i'm getting hung up on a lot of things about SD baking. I think the only way for me to learn is to just just keep making bread. Alot of it stems from not understanding fully how natural yeast work and its potential despite the fact that I have a biology degree and have taken microbiology courses. i mean i understand the life cycle and reproduction of yeast but not the full extent of it when it comes to baking. For example, the post about Abe making bread with a tip of a teaspoon amount of starter. the inoculation makes sense but how is it that small amount of yeast can support all that dough. the yeast is consuming the flour and multiplying i suppose and if you give it the right conditions (time , temperature etc) i guess it makes sense that it works. but still.... it's not something i would have ever thought to try in my wildest dreams.
Another question i have is, why does my lower hydration bread have a more open crumb than my higher hydration one? assuming all the other factors and conditions have been the same . IDK maybe i overfermented my higher hydration dough?
i'm "reading" Tartine now. The basic sd recipe is actually almost exactly what i had been making all along. i'm onto the next chapter which discusses baguettes and has a levain build. The levain is asking for mature starter. Exactly what does mature mean. Just starter that's strong? Or a starter that has been built up already? Or am i just getting hung up on that again?
BTW, i keep staring at Abe's polenta SD. it looks so delicous
A small amount of yeast supports all that dough because yeast will propagate inside dough until it reaches 1-2 billion yeast cells per each gram of flour in that dough. In other words, it will continue to multiply until the entire mass of dough will become a mature/ripe starter. Of course, one doesn't have to wait that long, we can bake it before that because besides multiplying existing yeast cells also produce gas and leaven the dough.
If you used the same techniques with the lower and higher hydration batches of dough, the different results were to be expected, because more water means more distance between protein molecules -> more difficult for gluten to form (for proteins to link into gluten network), it is also more difficult to knead to develop gluten, takes more time or more turns, and softer dough is stickier, its layers collapse and glue themselves together easily into a gooey mass, just like in pancakes.
Every recipe for the starter comes with the criteria of its maturity, and Tartine starter is not an exception. This book describes how to create a starter for a loaf that would have a typical Tartine flavor and what it looks like and smells like when mature or when young (Chad Robertson likes to use young and very young starter/levain in his baking as well). His starter is 100% hydration, a 50:50 blend of white and whole grain wheat flours, but it is not just any 100% hydration starter, there is a specific recipe for it and it takes about 3 days to create it, to select the desirable microflora in it.
Once his starter is ready, it is fed 1:4 and left at 18-20C (65-68F) until it triples or quadruples in volume and begins to recede. At that moment it has a very typical flavor of a Tartine starter and is considered to be mature.
His young starter which he mentions in his recipes is when his starter is fed 1:20 and left to ferment at 18-20C (65-68F) for 4-8 hrs, at which point it should rise about 20% in height and smell sweet and very milky-buttery, not like yougurt, but like sweet cream or warm full fat milk.
The authors of Modernist Bread illustrate how white sourdough starter looks at different stages of its maturity. For example, they photographed a 100% hydration starter fed 1:5 and kept at 21C (70F):
yes, the tiny amount of yeast continues to multiply because ur essentially feeding it with the flour you've mixed in so why is it that weaker or immature starters yield failed loaves or not so desirable crumbs.
My question about higher hydration dough vs lower one is that my crumb is actually tighter with the higher hydration one than the lower one but isnt the opposite supposed to be true. I'm wondering why that rule seems to be the opposite for me.
thanks for the pictures