November 27, 2018 - 5:39pm
Loaf Not Forming Up
I am from Tampa, Florida. I created a poolish/biga/sponge with 141g of all purpose flour, 141g of chlorine free water, and 3g of yeast. It rested over night (unrefrigerated).
I combined the poolish with an additional 259g of all purpose flour, 139g of water, 8g of salt, and 1g of yeast today. Total measurements:
- 400g flour
- 280g water (70% hydration)
- 8g salt
- 4g yeast
I have kneaded it by hand for 20 minutes and for another 10 minutes in my KitchenAid.
Any ideas?
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Follow-up to my original post:
I suspect the problem was over-fermentation. Did I let my poolish ferment too long?
For that amount I would probably have used max 1 gram, or even less. with 3 grams the poolish would be overfermented.
have you got a picture of the crumb?
See what others say.
If I were you, I would have inverted the quantities of yeast: 1g in the poolish and 3g in the rest of the dough.
The way I see it, is: you want a poolish because of flavour, to develop good flavour, you need long fermentation. Yeast starvation is no good. Even if the poolish isn't entirely depleted of food for your yeast, if it fermented long enough, there will be flavor anyway, so put a lot less of yeast, and let it ferment.
I live in Brazil, we have high temperatures here (~33 °C, this month avg.), and this week I've been baking with yeast + poolish/biga, since I let my sourdough die. I usually use about 1/4 teaspoon of instant yeast for a overnight pre-ferment. In the scale it doesn't even measure 1g. It works all right, good flavour, great extensibility.
So yeah, I would go with lot less yeast in the poolish and a about 3g in the dough.
I just went and measured 3 gr. yeast, and that is 1 tsp. I only use 1/2 tsp. in my 600 gr. baguette straight dough recipe!
I only use a pinch of yeast in 300 gr. of flour in my overnight poolish.
For those quantities of flour, I'd use a small pinch in the poolish, and 1/2 tsp. in the final dough.
that you use 0.2% fresh yeast in a poolish. So for 141g flour, that would be 0.28g fresh yeast, or 0.11g IDY. Unfortunately, not many people have a scale that will measure these miniscule quantities, so they resort to a "tiny pinch", which should do the trick for you.
Lance
If you want to keep doing poolish and need accuracy for consistency a set of jewelers scales become very handy and are quite cheap to by on platforms such as e bay. i think i got mine for A$10.00 incl postage.