Hi there,
I have been baking Sourdough for awhile now, but have never made more than 4 loaves at a time.
I have built a wood fired oven and now have the capacity to bake larger quantities of bread. I’ve recently been asked if I’d be able to supply 40 loaves per week to a local general store.
Does anyone have any experience in preparing large quantities of levain?
For example, I am wishing to bake 40 loaves in one day, which would equate to 4000kg of levain required for the recipe I use.
Can I simply feed 200gm of starter with 2000kg flour and 2000kg of water to yield the necessary levain? Basically, I wonder if it’s possible to use any amount of starter to yield any amount of levain...
If anyone could shed some light on this for me, that would be greatly appreciated!
Many thanks!!
4000 kg? That's 8818 pounds.... of Levain? I don't think you would need that much dough weight even.
A 1 kg loaf would be 2.2 pounds. Times 40 would be 88.8 pound..... of dough weight. Not levain. You likely want less levain.
hester
Hahaha...good observation Hester, I meant to write 4000gm or 4 kilos of levain. Not 4 tonne! That would be a whole lotta bread!
just asking since it's always best to know customers' expectations in complete detail so as not to run into unanticipated surprises due to assuming things that aren't so.
The general store gets plenty of traffic on the weekend, so 40 loaves are needed all at once.
I've never made more than 1 kg of levain, but afaik, you can do as you thought, use 200 gm of starter to make 4 kg of levain by adding 2 kg water and 2 kg flour.
That said, I suspect you may want to experiment a bit to see how long this takes for the levain to be ready, and whether you might want to change the ratio so that the time it takes for it to be ready works with how and when you want to schedule the rest of the baking process.
You could easily go from 400 grams of vigorous starter to 4,000 grams of production levain in an 8-12 hour period.
Thanks Grind, for the information. I'm glad that you picked up I meant 4,000grams, as opposed to the 4,000 kg I originally wrote!