Yo! Love y’all—love this sub.
Here’s what’s going on:
I was gifted 100g of a local bakery’s production discard—tight. Love that for me. It was purchased yesterday morning, then went in the fridge overnight. I pulled it out this morning and let it warm up for an hour before feeding it.
Alright, I’ve been using FWSY as my bread baking guide, so naturally I used Ken’s levain method. I questioned the quantity of flour and water he wants you to use, but decided to trust him, and daaaammmmnnnn, y’all: I have so much starter growing, and it’s only been 6.5 HOURS since I mixed it. And I have to feed it the same amount tomorrow before I can bake with it on Friday?!
I bake a loaf or two a week for context. So what’s the move here? Do I feed it again tomorrow and bake as much as I can with what I have on Friday so I don’t waste it?
THANK YOU!!
——
FWSY QUANTITIES
100g Levain
100g Whole Wheat Flour
400g All-Purpose Flour
400g Water at 90F
*I see more clearly now that the quantities are for a small bakery or something, and not for me and my girlfriend on a cozy weekend!!
by st0keddd
28 Comments
There is a non-zero probability that that will blow out the top and into your components…..but you do you.
You only need 1 yeast cell to start up any batch.
Those are ridiculous quantities for a starter, for sure. A levain is a branch-off from a starter. If you’re only preparing a levain, it should likely be fed once and used immediately at peak.
Scale back whatever you wanna call your starter to something reasonable, like 30g or whatever, and limit your levain weight to 20% of the total flour weight of whatever recipe you’re baking.
Feed starter – take starter at peak, make levain – use levain at peak – nothing else needed.
Is that your starter in the cambro?
How much did you feed?
I keep a 50g starter and feed 1:1:1 which works well.
That cambro looks like it has a full loaf proofing in it..
Drop it to a smaller more manageable size if you want for maintenance and feed up to get the quantity for baking.
Unless you keep it in the fridge you will discard daily, which you can bake with or just dispose of.
This is just your starter? For home baking you don’t need nearly that much. Discard all but ~50g and then add 50g of flour and 50g of water for a feeding. This will give you the 100g you need to bake and then you still have a little left over to feed. You can feed small amounts of starter to make as much as you need, even if it’s just scrapings on the side of your jar.
If you don’t want to waste your discard, you can keep it in the fridge and then look up discard recipes.
Hot take: Forkish isn’t very good at explaining things. Exhibit A: apparently didn’t consider scaling down his recipes from professional volumes.
Time to find a discard cracker recipe or a discard blueberry pancake recipe… on the bright side, you figured out quickly how to remedy this and it’s not sourdough until some mistakes have been made!
That’s a lot of starter.
> and he did me dirty
Huh?
You sure those quantities aren’t for the entire bake?
Those look more like the amounts you would use when baking a standard 2 loaf batch🤷🏻♂️
If you want a great resource check out The Perfect Loaf.
He has a bunch of great recipes – from hi hydration to low hydration, really easy to understand directions. Pictures, videos – it has been a great resource for me.
Funny story—I actually work at a bakery where I have to calculate the starter and mix it BY HAND for the next day. I did my math for all our recipes and came to 14,000g. Cool. Except I then added 14KG of ice water to 14KG of flour and made 28KG of starter. My hand was cramping, I’m pretty sure I never got to all the dry flour and I ended up tossing half of it anyways. Never made that mistake again.
Yup, I fell for it too when I was starting out. I see a freezer full of discard starter english muffins in your future .. and a pantry full of discard crackers 🙂
I now do it purposely at times when I want to build up my starter for sharing, or doing some bulk orders.
https://amybakesbread.com/easy-sourdough-discard-english-muffins-no-mixer/
https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/easiest-sourdough-discard-crackers-recipe
I love his bread recipes, and he got me into making pizza too, but his levain and starter feeding amounts are absolutely ridiculous for a regular at home baker. Unless you’re trying to bake a ridiculous amount. Recently I made his country blonde, and just started a levain with my regular starter recipe (1:1:1), and the bread turned out great. Use his actual bread recipes, ignore his levain.
When I’m just feeding for maintenance I do a spoonful of starter. 20g bread flour, 20g whole wheat, 40g water. (Roughly, I don’t stress too hard about being exact, just 50/50 on flour to water).
https://alexandracooks.com/2022/09/11/easy-sourdough-discard-crackers-5-ingredients/
Try this! I made them for the first time last weekend and will never be buying crackers again they turned out so good.
Starting strong 💪
At least your starter has good activity!
As a fellow FWSY user, let me also caution you against his levain feeding quantities in the sourdough section. Read ahead a little, and you’ll notice he only asks you to use like 20% of the crazy amount of levain you just made the night before. Besides that, the book is great!
I followed the same book but scaled it down so I wasn’t wasting so much starter.
50g starter
200g water
200g AP flour
50g wholemeal flour
I’ve been using this for 3 years and it’s worked great.
Haha, I also learned the hard way! The enormous volume of the levains he prescribes is completely ridiculous but I really like FWSY. Oh, and the pincer technique he recommends for hand mixing is also stupid haha
I would never recommend forkish to anyone, especially not to anyone inexperienced or new to the art.
The first bread recipe I tried after someone gave me a starter was out of Dan Lepard’s book, The Handmade Loaf. I’d tried some of the non-sourdough recipes in it and they were great, so somehow my brain switched off a bit when I was picking a recipe to start with and I just disregarded the fact that it involved a whole kilo of flour. I ended up with two huge loaves – luckily they turned out edible.
I’ve since scaled down to a more sensible 70% hydration recipe based on 350gr of flour. But I’m still a bit mad at Dan for including a double-batch recipe in a home baking book. I’d much rather scale up a recipe if I want to make double, than have to scale down every time I bake.
I think he recommends dumping most of it first.
On Friday when you have made your dough. Pinch off a piece the size of an egg.
About 60 grams or 2 ounces worth of dough. Knead into it about 30 grams or 1 ounce of flour. Place in a small container and store it for next time.
Then google things to do with discard. I generally make crackers or pancakes.
I hope that is useful.
Make a few loaves this time and gift em!
Sourdough discard scones! So easy and delicious.
Tons of recipes out there I made the Lemon Poppyseed scones from littlepearlsbakery on Instagram!
Discard pancakes and waffles, throw them in the feezer for quick and easy breakfasts when you just don’t have time!
Put like 200g in fridge and make something with the rest like crackers or pancakes. Only replace what you use.
For whomever needs to hear this: Keep a small starter!!!!
Most sourdough recipes are ridiculous (including this one, which I considered for half a minute). “Oh take 1 cup of starter, and feed with 1 cup of flour and water… discard 2 cups tomorrow.” It’s absurd.
Take 5-10 grams starter, feed with 20 g flour and 20 g water. Repeat daily to keep at steady state (45-50 total grams).
When you bake, just take the whole thing and feed with 100 g flour and 100 g water, and you’re good to go the next day with a 1000 g flour recipe.
Dial in these measurements as needed, based on temperature or your starter’s activity.
Extra points if you use a ceramic cloche to bake instead of a steel Dutch oven. #noburntbottoms.
First thing I did when making the pain de campagne was half the amount of levain. It makes so damn much.
Yeah. The starter he has you start with is ridiculous. Discard overkill.
The recipes are solid but I learned to only make enough total levain for what I was baking.