I adjusted my sourdough starter to 80% hydration rate. How do I adjust a recipe calling for 100% starter to an 80% hydration recipe or do I need to adjust? Hope this question makes sense to anyone?
Thanks,
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Then don't sweat it. If you'd like to still be precise or its a large amount of starter/levain then build a preferment and adjust the hydration when you do so.
You can also approach it more "scientifically" by taking into account the flour within the starter and making sure yours correlates with the recipe.
Say you have a recipe like so...
So the starter in the recipe has 50g water + 50g flour. So use enough of your starter that equals the 50g flour within the starter asked for in the recipe and add the water back in to make up the difference. Like so...
80% hydration = 8g water for every 10g flour (8+10 = 18). So if you need 50g flour within your starter then you'd need 5x18 = 90g starter!
So 90g of your starter at 80% hydration has 40g water + 50g flour. There's your 50g of pre-fermented flour. Then simply add 10g water back into the recipe to make up the difference. So your recipe will be...
That is one way. Either that or build a preferment to give you 100g starter at 100% hydration and keep the final recipe as it is.
In our example the difference is small so you may just choose to keep it how it is and use 100g of your starter and just watch the dough a bit more carefully. If it's a larger amount of starter then I'd suggest some adjustments will be necessary.