I recently purchased the cookbook Poilâne by Apollonia Poilâne and was wondering if anyone has used her sourdough starter recipe?
It uses yogurt in addition to whole wheat and all purpose flour.
It also uses all of the first-fermentation mix as a base for the second-fermentation mix.
Any thoughts?
For that very reason Mme Poilâne's book has not received a particularly warm welcome here. Personally I can attest that after a decade +/- of SD baking, reading and monitoring this site regularly, I'd never heard of using yogurt to start a starter until I cracked that book in a shop. Huh? Disappointing. But ... who knows?
If you've got pandemic isolation time on your hands, by all means give it a try (assuming your neighbors haven't been hoarding all the yogurt off local shelves) and post your results here. At the same time, you might want to start your own sourdough starter, using one of the many method variations to be found at TFL. For example, our very own Danny Ayo reports generating a very active starter with fresh milled rye in just a few days.
Bon chance avec Poilâne.
Tom
I'm retired (though I still do some paid-for work) and with staying in (mostly) I'll give it a try. I'm trying to revivify some SD starter that's been sitting in the back of the frig for several months. That's not going so well, so I may just start a parallel process of Mme P's and a regular starter with home-milled wheat berries and organic AP flour.
I was just in London, went to one of Poilâne's shops there (good lunch spot) and bought a kilo of their flour too. Won't use it for the starter, but will use it to bake the bread.
I shall report back when I have results.