Hey all my name is Scott and I’ve been baking for a few years. Really enjoying it. Baking combines my interest in cooking, chemistry, microbiology, and working with my hands.
So I too have been reading about stiff levains and decided to try an experiment. I split my starter a week ago and fed both side by side 2x/day. One at 100% hydration and one at 60%. Mixed up two levains at the same hydration ratios and made doughs of my standard country loaf to see any differences.
In the pic above left is the liquid levain and right is the stiff.
Observations:
Loaf volume slightly better in the stiff culture loaf. Not a huge amount though. Will try proofing a bit more in successive bakes to see if the loaf volume difference exaggerated.
Stiff culture loaf is slightly less sour, but not a ton. The difference being small is probably more a reflection of my liquid levain loaf not being all that sour anyways. Still was a bit surprised though as there is a marked difference in acid production between the two starters, very evident when ripe. Expected that to translate more in the final loaves.
Maintaining a stiff culture while more difficult to stir is more pleasant for me. Ripening is slower, starter vessel gets way less funky, and incorporating stuff levains into doughs is not easier, but more pleasant whatever that means.
Anyways to be continued. Going to reduce starter and levain hydration’s to 50% and see if there are further noticeable changes, and try and use singularly for brioches ala levito madre. We’ll see.
Scott
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Yesss, join the stiff starter club! ?
Not only are they easier to maintain and feel nicer to handle, the little dough balls are just so cute. Never going back.
I might be interested in joining this club--do you have directions to the clubhouse? In all seriousness: guidance on the process would be much appreciated if you have it.
Many thanks--
There's honestly not much guidance I can give; the process is pretty much the same as a liquid starter just with less water. The primary reason I switched was because it's easier to keep a smaller stiff starter (20< grams) than it is to keep a smaller liquid one but I've since found a whole bunch of reasons to prefer a stiff starter. It is a little more difficult to tell when it's peaked/past its peak but feedings are also more flexible (since the stronger gluten doesn't collapse as easily) so it doesn't really matter. You do need dirty your hands in order to mix the dough but the ease of not having to dirty up any additional jars or utensils as you would with a liquid starter FAR outweighs the doughy hands (besides, you should probably be washing your hands anyway after handling a liquid starter). I personally prefer to make a liquid levain out of my stiff starter since it's much easier to mix into the final dough and converting the recipe quantities is a bore but you can certainly make a stiff levain as well: use the same amount of flour for the levain as called for in the recipe, chop the stiff levain into tiny bits, measure out the difference in water from the recipe, and swoosh around the levain bits and water until you get a gooey substance that can be mixed into the dough.
The only gripe I have with stiff starters is that they become annoying if you feed them a high quantity of rye flour. Stiff rye starters don't rise...like AT ALL. That doesn't mean they aren't healthy, it's just that the rye is too weak to withstand it's own weight so any gas produced by the yeast escapes. I follow the procedure for a 100% whole grain rye stiff starter given by MiniOven here on this site in which you coat the doughball in flour so that way cracks form on the surface as the dough ripens and you can better track the fermentation of the starter (the starter is also fully fermented when it smells ripe and the interior is gooey rather than like wet sand). Even though it's much more of a pain to keep than a wheat one, I still prefer keeping my rye starter stiff since I'd rather deal with doughballs over mucus-y glop. Plus, I kinda like the holistic nature of judging fermentation through smell and "feel" as opposed to looking for a precise increase in size.
I feed my wheat starter half WW flour and half bread flour at a ratio of 1:2:4. I feed my rye starter a ratio of 3:5:7 (MiniOven's suggestion).
Thanks! To be totally honest, I've done something like this for some 21 years (with the same homemade stiff starter), but I was apparently winging it and recently discovered maybe I could get better results with some science. My old method was to keep a piece from a fully risen dough, feed it, store it in the fridge, and then use it as levain in the next dough. There was no system to this, and the stiff dough was probably 60 percent and about 200g. I would then mix the whole 200g with about 350g or so flour (I didn't measure) or whatever (I've used breadcrumbs and many other things) to make a new dough. It also rose, etc. but I wasn't getting great crumb all of the time.
Recently, for reasons you might guess, I started baking more. I thought I'd apply some science and went in search of what I thought would be years of YouTube videos only to find nothing really. I've searched through here a lot, but I haven't found something that I understand well. I tried adapting liquid starter recipes I found around. I've had some success with that (and I've learned a lot), but I still don't have a solid method for determining how long bulk ought to be, how much stiff starter is optimal, etc. If you have ideas on that I'd be very grateful.
Thanks so much in the meantime!
Great looking loaves. Indeed, it's very satisfying working with stiff levain. I build a stiff levain in two stages when I want to bake. So I still keep a liquid starter in the fridge and build the stiff one from it.
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