Newbie to sourdough and baker's percentages recipes here. Just a quick question:
I obtained the following recipe for a stiff levain starter from a local baker:
Stiff Levain
Baker's % | Ingredients | Batch Size (kg) |
100.00 | Bread Flour | 0.480 |
50 | Water | 0.024 |
20 | Starter | 0.010 |
170 | Total | 0.082 |
"Combine ingredients and let ferment for 12-18 hours"
So I took 10g of my stiff starter (at 50% hydration) and combined it with 480g flour and 24g water. This was a huge amount of flour relative to the water and starter. Can this be right? What am I missing? Was the total weight of the stiff starter supposed to be 82g (which I am only now just seeing)?
The total flour is the 100% value.
So you start with 480g of flour.
Water: 50% of 480g is 240g water. You're a factor of 10 out here.
Starter: 20% of 480g is 96g starter (again, almost a factor of 10 out)
170% total - is just silly. ignore that one. The total will be the total weght: 480+240+96 = 816g
Personally, I think that bakers percentages might not be the best way to represent this sort of thing, however its very common.
Anyway - that is giving you a lot of levian - at a hydration of about 50%. Just add water and knead to make a bread dough... Unless you'll then be using that levian to make many loaves (all at once, or kept in the fridge to be used every few days or so?) - that'll be enough to ferment out a dough with 4-5Kg of flour in it...
-Gordon
I looked at it again. Looks like the decimal is misplaced in the recipe I got in the bread flour column.
All makes sense to me now and I agree that the 170 is kind of dumb
If you still have that mix, you can probably just add the balance of water into it to make up the 50% hydration levian.
The bakers percentages thing - and the > 100% thing ... it's somewhat weird if you have a bit of a background in numbers but it works well for some folks. ie. you're working to a percentage of one ingredient rather than a percentage of the total weight.... I think it can get overly complicated when you have recipes with multiple parts to it (separate levian builds then the final mix and so on).
-Gordon
so adopting the approach you propose here, is it a concern that the volume of starter relative to the flour and water will be so low?
I am at work now and what I have waiting for me at home is a bowl full of mostly flour and a little water and stiff starter all mixed up in a bowl. The plan was to use this levain to do a bake tomorrow.
Yes, it's much easier to just remember that a 50% hydration starter (or dough) just means there is half the weight of water to flour(s), whatever the amount you need. But the 170% isn't just silly - it's very useful to calculate weights of ingredients in your doughs when you know how much total dough you want to end up with, and need to know how much of each ingredient to use. King Arthur Flour has a good tutorial for this at http://www.kingarthurflour.com/professional/bakers-percentage.html.
Check out Bread Magazine at https://bread-magazine.com/sourdough-bread-recipe/ for more interesting information and how-to's for baker's percentages.