Preferment questions
I have been baking sourdough bread for quite a while, but i am starting to get more and more into yeasted breads, because it fits better into my schedule and i just generally dont have as much stress about it. I am also learning about preferments, because i want to make up for the loss of flavor i might lose using commercial yeast instead of sourdough. So far, what i have learned is that they help with flavor and strength in the dough. But i was wondering why you would use one preferment over another? Hope you can answer these questions:
What does different preferments do, for example biga and poolish? I mean in terms of everything you can think of, crumb, crust, taste, extensibility, elasticity, height, volume, softness, chewiness etc..
What does different amounts of preferments do? Typically 30% of the flour is prefermented, but what would making more or less do? Would it simply make the effects of the preferment greater?
These are the only one i can think of now, but i might ask some more in the comments :)
Preferments such as poolish (so-named by the French after the Polish bakers who originally developed it) and biga (an Italian version) are used mainly to enhance the flavor of bread thanks to the significant amount of pre-fermented dough that has developed flavor during a 12-18 hr fermentation before being added to the final dough. Poolish is mixed at 100% hydration, while biga is typically about 60% hydration. Poolish is often used in production of baguettes thanks to the protease enzymes it produces which add extensibility to dough. Poolish produces a distinct nuttiness that I have not found in bigas. Why this is so is beyond my bread chemistry knowledge. But it is one additional reason it is favored in production of baguettes.
Typical amounts of pre-fermented dough are in the 30% - 40% range.
Hope that helps,
Larry
Thank you very much for that :)
Also, you say: "Typical preferment amounts are in the 30-40% range.". Do you know what difference doing more preferment would do, or less?
I won't be able to give you the answers that you want, Theo, but I can tell you that some of your assumptions or statements are not entirely correct.
There is no loss of flavor when you change your method of breadmaking from indirect to direct dough or from sourdough to yeasted, or even to soda, etc.. Or vice versa. They are equivalent when done correctly, they give excellent quality of bread if your ingredients are of good quality. Meaning your bread flour is not too weak nor too strong, too coarsely milled etc.
The only advantage for the baker is in time management, because with indirect methods the bread dough is ready very soon after mixing it and can be shaped and baked quickly. Essentially, preferments ferment when the baker sleeps or bakers from the previous shift in his bakery would prepare them for him.
1) So, preferments save you time. That is what they do.
Biga is just a name, it can be stiff or liquid, whereas poolish has certain consistency, it is not characterised by proportion of flour to water (1:1), but by its soft consistency which is not too runny nor to thick.
If by biga you mean super stiff cold preferment, then such biga was historically designed to deal with weak Italian wheats, it strengthens gluten and maximises the amount of gluten formed.
Poolish originally was meant to help with hydrating coarsely milled, grainy European flours resembling semolas, semolinas, semolas rimacinatas. It takes longer for them to soften and make dough, so preferment that is not too watery nor too stiff helps. Its consistency also helps with mixing it or beating it with a spoon or an oar used in olden times to mix preferments in huge buckets.
Liquid preferments usually help when your bread flour is too strong, they will help you destroy some of its gluten.
2) 30% prefermented flour is not typical, because typically bread is baked professionally, industrially or at least in artisan bakeries and restaurants, millions of tonnes of great bread worldwide, not on the Internet or in the books which happened to cross yours or my path.
Preferments can have 1/4, 1/3, 1/2, 2/3, or 100% of all flour prefermented (as in 100% sponge method). Each method gives good bread, the difference, again, is in its convenience for the baker. Some bakeries have equipment to deal with liquid preferments, which can be pumped (20-30% flour prefermented), others work with 50%, 70%, or 100% soft or stiff sponges, etc.
There are rules and schedules for dealing with each preferment, with preferment of each size and consistency, certain time and temperature requirements, so the baker plans his work accordingly.
Mostly, bakers choose some specific method depending on their circumstances: flour quality, number of shifts at their bakery, time and equipment available, costs, etc. Personal preferences and tradition, school of baking, are important as well. Some methods you simply like more than others, who knows why. Just because. Because ultimately they all work and in theory would give equally great bread given equally good ingredients.
Mariana - This isn't typical social media so there's no "heart" button. But your discussion here really captures some important ideas. In engineering parlance we'd say "Bread baking is a forward problem", meaning, you can't look at a loaf of bread and figure out a unique inversion into its production process. Instead, you develop (and tweak) processes to get out a bread that you like. And a whole lot of quite different processes will work.
As you note, traditions and schools of baking do have a role in how an individual baker sets up their starting point. And perhaps a succinct answer to the original question from Theodough is something like - why don't you try some recipes using different preferment types with the ingredients you have available and see what results? Then you can tweak the execution of a particular recipe/process to make small changes.
I've always found this article on preferments by Didier Rosada useful. It's an overview, so may not answer all of your questions....
(The original webpage has gone, so I've linked to the Wayback machine version.)
In my experience, a "proper" Italian Biga should always be stiff (45-55% hydration), use 1% fresh yeast, or dried equivalent, and be fermented at 16-18C.
Lance
Are there to increase the ferment time and therefore flavour. If you don't have time for sourdough then replacing it with yeasted preferments won't be the answer. I think the answer is time management as sourdough doesn't have to be time consuming.
I find sourdough to be annoying, because i have to care for it and if i dont bake with it for like a week, i have to waste a bunch of time and flour to feed and discard it.
I don't waste any flour nor time feeding it. Sourdough starter maintenance is as easy as building a yeasted preferment.
Build enough starter overnight for what's needed in the recipe plus a few extra grams. Take off what you need and keep the excess in the fridge. Repeat for every recipe.
Yes, but if i dont bake for a week (which i sometimes end up not doing), it tends to get very sluggish and then i dont get very nice bread with it. If i would have to make it fresh again, it would be feeding and discarding.
I don't have this issue with a whole grain rye starter. It is very robust to fridge storage. If I haven't used it for many weeks, maybe I would build a 2-stage levain (feed a portion of the starter twice before mixing the final dough, but no need to discard anything), but even a 1-stage high-ratio (1:10:10) feed would work well.
Well, i might try doing that then and seeing if my starter does well.
Hmm.. This gets me thinking. Would you be able to make a preferment, poolish or biga, with a sourdough starter?
That's a question of semantics. I think really any SD preferment is generally called a levain, but depends on who you ask. Then you can choose what hydration to use for the preferment, and then it'll resemble one or the other yeasted preferment. But of course it's not the same, and just the starter itself is really already a preferment.
Btw for a more systematic approach for keeping a rye starter in the fridge very long, see here: https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/40918/no-muss-no-fuss-starter
A levain!
I agree with Ilya. I gave in to sourdough because I wanted to make high percentage rye breads. I really don't care for the constant feeding that I see with typical cultures, but the rye sour culture is very forgiving to storage as Ilya states. If it hasn't been fed for a couple weeks, I will feed once at 1:10:10 and then use it for any preferment (sponge, levain, etc.).
I had been discarding my discards (I really don't want a lot of muffins, pancakes, or whatever), but now I'm saving it to try making some "Sourdough Spice" as shown on Bread Code.
Like you I've recently become interested in preferments. I did some poolish foccacia and liked working with the poolish. I didn't know what would be the best (for me) preferment. I did bookmark this page by Modernist Bread Which answered some of my questions. https://modernistbread.com/are-biga-poolish-and-sponge-interchangeable/?utm_source=Bread+Magazine&utm_campaign=45ab58c0be-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_10_13_10...
Hope that helps with some of your quesstions.