The ONE thing that makes or breaks your sourdough!

[Music] okay so this is the year that you're going to be successful with your sourdough and I'm going to help you I've been teaching this for a really long time and 99% of the time when people end up with large holes in their in their dough um or in their bread after it's been baked or if it's gummy or flat often times or almost always they say I overproofed my dough well I'm here to tell you that that's almost never the case if you have a proper preferment for your sourdough and you have a optimal bulk fermentation it is really really difficult to overproof your dough to the point that you end up with Gummy or flat sourdough it is almost always the case that it is underdeveloped gluten and where does underdeveloped gluten start it starts with your starter it starts with your preferment so I'm going to show you today how to gauge whether or not your preferment or your leavon is ready to make bread because often people will only use and rely on the flow test and that is a good gauge as to whether you have an active sour dough starter but it really it really leaves a lot of gaps because often people will let their sourdough go way too far and it still floats on water so they think well that's going to be fine for my bread when really it's not active enough to actually levven your bread in such a way that you get this beautiful structure and oven spring and nice open crumb that we're all kind of going for so um I'm going to show you how I make my leaven uh I have another video on how I make my sourdough starter how I feed my sourdough starter I use a ratio of 50501 so I do 50 gram of water 50 gram of flour and 10 G of your starter from the previous day the reason that I do that is because that allows me to be able to gauge exactly how much food my sourdough starter is eating so if I keep like a giant bowl or like a container lots of people will keep like a giant container like this big of their sourdough starter and they just add to it every single day the problem with that is that over time so you need EX at least equal amounts of starter to your food which is your flour so over time if you have a giant container like this well it has to keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and then all of a sudden you have like a huge mixing bowl full of sourdough starter it just doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense you can never actually get a really active Starter by keeping your sourdough starter that way so how I like to do it is I like to feed just into a small little jar and again I have another video on exactly how I do that um and the reason that I like that is because then I know exactly how much food my starter is getting so it gets to eat and grow and eat and grow and eat and grow five times so 5 to one ratio I use the exact same ratio when I'm making my preferment or my leevon for my dough so this is a leav this is just a large feed of a sourdough starter I'm going to use this entire thing when I make my dough later so I'm going to show you in a little bit exactly how to do that how to make your your leevon and how to gauge whether or not it's ready um so obviously this one's ready and I'm going to show you what to look for when when you're looking for your Le being ready but back to the ratios if you would like to make a leav so let's pretend that your sourdough recipe calls for 300 G of starter or leavon all you have to do is divide that in half you need 150 g of water 150 g of flour and then you take 10% of that so 30 G of your sourdough starter so this is my sourdough starter that's exactly how I made this okay so I did I wanted 300 gam of leav I took 150 water 150 g of flour and then 30 G out of this and I put it in here and I mixed it up and then I let it get active you're going to use the whole entire thing in your sourdough so that is like a super simple uh recipe for 11 for any sourdough recipe that you're going to use you literally just take how much they're a calling for in the recipe and divide it in half equal parts flour and water and then your 10% of your of your sourdough starter so that gives you your nice big leaven that you're going to use in your sourdough um your sourdough dough re recipe um and I'm going to show you how to make sure that your leevon is optimal for making dough because there's no point in going forward if especially if you're new to sourdough there's absolutely no point in moving forward in the process if your leaven is not up to PR because that is what is going to give you good fermentation in your dough that is what is going to give you the activity and the strength in your dough and the development of your gluten and the development of your gluten is pretty much the name of the game so unless you have a good preferment there's no point in moving moving forward so let's talk about what that looks like I'm going to show you mine I'm going to show you what not to use and I'm going to show you how to make it so first I'm going to show you examples of preferments or Levens and my starters and then I'm going to show you how to mix one up and what to do so these two are the exact same ratios and same size jars okay uh the difference is this was made quite a bit further in advance than this one this one you could say could be used for sourdough this is not good enough for me and I'll show you why so I have some water here so this will technically Float On The Water okay technically you could use this for sourdough okay so that's one way of determining whether or not your sourdough starter is ready for bread however you can see here so here are the other things that I use to gauge whether or not my sourdough is ready for bread you can see here that it has risen all the way up to the top okay so you can see it came all the way up to here just like this one did okay so this one has come all the way up to the top see how close to the top that is so that came up to there and it has now fallen back down so yes it is floating yes it's active when I bang it on the counter a little bit but it is still really quite soupy so if I was to pour this into a jar or into a bowl it would kind of pour out there's not a lot of activity that you can see left in there okay so again when I hit the bottom you can kind of see a little a few bubbles kind of forming on the top but if I was to leave that alone that's just going to keep getting flatter and flatter so for me like again it's up there it was up there and and now it's way down here so to me this is just not this is not what I want to use for my sourdough I can use it but what I'm going to run into if I use this is I'm going to run into stickier dough I'm going to feel like my dough needs more flour your dough never needs more flour when you're doing a recipe um the only reason it would need more flour is because this isn't active enough okay so and we're going to talk about that when we make your leav too depending on what type of starter you make your leav with so it always comes back back to here it always comes back to your starter your preferment all of that um this again technically it floats on water it's still floating on the Water by the way still floating theoretically this is usable for your dough this isn't good enough for me I would use this as discard or make a pizza with it or make cinnamon rolls or something different I would not make bread with this it will just be frustrating for me especially if you're new to sourdough this one one it has it doesn't have any streaks so it hasn't fallen back down at all it's not even quite to the peak yet because you'll see how it deflates like that and I can kind of tilt it we're going to tilt this up a little bit you can see how it's kind of like stretching away from the sides of the jar there see how how much stretch that has how many strands of gluten you can like really see in there that is what I want my starter and my ferment to look like before I make my bread this exactly what I'm going for so this has risen up this is called a young leaven so um it has come to the peak but and it has started to pillow but this will sit like this probably um for like another I could say probably another hour because my my home is quite chilly um I could probably get another hour out of that and it not have fallen too much back down so I still have some time with this one this one could sit basically what you're looking for is when I banging this on the counter like I just did if I was to cover this back up and leave it it's going to rise back up again there's still so much activity left in there that's going to rise back up again this is what I want for my dough this is going to have so much strength you can see the gluten strength in there for what I need um for my sourdough in order to leaven it properly so that is what I'm looking for not this you'll see when I stretch this from the side of the jar like there's a little bit in there that's stretching but really not much okay so this is what you want to look for not floating obviously this one's going to float on the water too that one's still floating over there um that's not really what you're looking for you're looking for the consistency of the rising of the jar you're not looking for streaks where it's falling back down from the jar um this was its peak it's now down here so your starter can float on water for a really long time and not necessarily be strong enough to leaven your bread optimally okay so now I'm going to show you I'm going to teach you how to get it to look like this all right so here's three examples of a sourdough starter you're making your preferment or your leavon from your sourdough starter so so I have three here I never keep three I only have three to show you examples um but this one for example is really runny so it's been sitting for a while um you can make 11 from all of these okay it will still activate so this one is quite runny it's been sitting for a while this one is also a little bit runny so it's been sitting for less time but it's also been sitting and then this one is fresh freshly fed just last night it has beautiful structure lots of gluten in there uh gluten strength in there um and it's you know obviously ready to power something optimally which one do you think is going to give you the best leav obviously this one is that being said you're more than welcome to make a from any of these the difference is when you make 11 from this one you're going to need more flour you're going to need more food so if I make my leavon with 150 g of water and 15 G of flour and then my 30 G of this uh it's going to give me a very different consistency than what this is going to give me does that make sense so basically I want a specific consistency I'm going to show you I want a specific consistency of my leav so if I'm using my ratio it can't be just a foolproof ratio so it's a great it's a great recipe for when you're doing your re for when you're doing your Levens for your different sourdough recipes but it's not foolproof because it always depends on what you're using here okay so if I go ahead and use this one well it's going to give me probably a runnier Sourdough leavon than if I'm going to use this one okay so that's fine but you have to keep into consideration that if I make my leav with this one with just 150 and 150 it's not going to give me that it's not going to look like this okay so what I need to keep in mind is I want to look for consistency of my sourdough leevon so I'm going to make it I'm going to show you what consistency I'm looking for if it doesn't give you the consistency you're looking for with this you need to add more flour so I know that that doesn't give you a 100% hydration in your leaven but that's okay it's better than adding more flour and getting gummy and flat sourdough bread at the end so I'm going to make one with this and I'm going to make one with this and I'm going to show you the difference in the consistencies and I'm going to show you how I add more flour to get the consistency I want so we're going to use our scale you can use any scale that you have that has a tear option we have our two different variables so we have our really soupy starter which still has some activity and then we have one that has lots of activity in it so let's start with our jars we're going to tear it to zero and we're going to put 150 g of water into the jar then we're going to tear back to zero and we're going to come in here and put 15 G of flour and tear it back to zero and then we're going to come in here and we're going to put 30 G of our soupy starter so it's about I usually don't measure it's usually about a big spoon so you have like your little teaspoons and then your big spoons it's about a big spoon so that that works out it's about 31 G there and then we're just going to Stir It Up okay and so this gives you like a thick kind of pancake batter which is fine this will work but and and this will absolutely work this is this is a fine consistency um but it falls off the spoon a little bit easier I'm going to show you what that looks like for the thick starter okay so we have our water and our flour and then we're just going to come in here and take you can see how much more activity is in this one so we'll get a big spoonful of that that's not quite 30 G trying to keep the variables as even as possible that's exactly 30 G there and then we'll stir this up so you can see already how much harder it is to stir this one simply because of the activity in the starter okay so this is really what I like to see this is the consistency that I like for my leevan that is going to give you so you can see how much harder it is for me to stir it how much thicker the leevon is so again this will work this is this this works fine but this one is really really thick that is a thick thick thick starter so it's hard to see in the video but I guess what I'm trying to get at is basically your leavon is only as good as your starter and your dough is only as good as your leavon so you really want to make sure that you have a really nice thick active Levan before you make your dough and you can make your your Levan out of this that's totally fine I would just add a tiny bit more flour to this one just to give a little bit more kick but you know you want to make it with a relatively active sourd starter because that's what's going to give you your activity in your leaven I mean you can already you see it stretching this will activate a lot faster than this one um it's just not near as thick okay so that is how I make my leavon and when we cover them up just cover them up with the top and we just leave them on the counter to get active and use all of it in our bread recipe so coming back to your starter your leavon is only as good as your starter is and your dough is only as strong and as structured as your leavon is um your starter is only as good as your flour so make sure that you're sourcing a really high quality bread flour or high protein um allpurpose flour I like to keep it at at least 133% protein especially for people who are newer to sourdough it tends to be um you know like the sweet spot so 133% will give you like a nice protein for building your starter from that when you're mixing up your leavon you really want to get in there and mix so you can't over mix this so the more that you're mixing it up the more that you're kind of like agitating it um the more you're starting to pre-developed gluten so I like to really like give it a really good mix and then basically what you're looking for is it should be able to go upside down and not fall out so it's like slowly kind of falling down this one um this one will fall like this one's coming right out again this is not a bad leaven it's just for people who are having issues with their bread it's really important to focus on protein content in your flour and your leaven and so if you're having issues with sticky sticky dough flat uh bread gummy bread underdeveloped bread all of those things come back to here come right back to your your leaven if you're not able to get a rise and activity like I sh like I showed in my leev then you want to go back to your flour what type of flow are you using and and maybe you'll need to switch that up a little bit so um those are just some tips and tricks that you want to keep in mind um protein content in your flour and a really nice strong active Levan and you almost always have success with your bread recipe

Channel: Turner Farm

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Id: 4FlQnNi-csg

Length: 18min 41sec (1121 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 03 2024