Dan & Chad’s Levain, UK & US

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Last year I knew how to achieve a sour or mild tasting loaf from adjusting the proportions of how the levain (leaven) was fed.  I don’t mean using a liquid or stiff starter which is a well known way of controlling acidity in a dough, I mean within your liquid starter you can affect the sourness of the resulting crumb by how much starter you use to feed the levain.

The starter, also known as mother-dough, is what’s used to take some to feed when you want to bake a loaf.  When you feed this bit of liquid dough you’ve removed from the ‘mother’ it’s referred to as levain (French) or leaven (English) and this is fed according to the baker’s recipe or the method you’ve learnt to bake.  I cut my sourdough teeth with Dan’s levain recipe and use it to bake a lot of my sourdoughs.

Jeffrey Hamelman’s

Last year I made some sourdough using Jeffrey Hamelman’s levain recipe from his Bread book who takes;

  • 28g starter  and feeds it with
  • 170g water
  • 136g flour
The odd amounts of grams is because Jeffrey’s measurements are calculated by ounces.  This levain I discovered produced a much milder tasting crumb than that of Dan’s fed levain.  When I looked around my other American bread books there seemed to be a preference to use a similar recipe for a liquid starter.
I thought it would be interesting to repeat this using 2 different methods of feeding liquid levain.  To try along side Dan’s recipe I chose Chad Robertson recipe from Tartine book, who like Dan uses equal amounts of flour and water to feed the levain.
Dan’s levain is fed:
  • 100g starter mixed with
  • 200g flour
  • 200g water.
Chad’s levain is fed:
  • 50g  starter (roughly 2 tablespoons)
  • 200g water
  • 200g flour

I left both levains to mature for quite a while, half an afternoon plus overnight, and by the morning both levains had past my preferred stage of ripeness and were on what I call “frothy bubble” stage, good to use but beginning to be on the decline.  The cycle of levain is photographed in a post of mine here.

Interestingly enough they both were at the same stage of maturity, in spite of having such differences in the amount of starter added.

Mixed the doughs according to the recipes in the books, Dan’s loaf is hydrated 65% and Chad’s hydration is 75%.

Not surprising Chad’s dough is harder to handle with tendency to tear the outer skin when shaping and spread out if left to rise without support.

For this reason I made Chad’s dough a little supporting nest, this is what I do when handling dough like this or wanting to control the spreading of dough.

The result this morning was the same as with my experience of Jeffrey’s levain, the loaf made according to Chad’s levain tastes so mild anyone would be pushed to recognise the term ‘sour’ and Dan has a mild but pronounced tang aftertaste.  Both of these doughs could’ve been retarded further overnight which would’ve gained in sourness.

Knowing how to manipulate a liquid levain is an easy and a good way of producing a loaf according to the eater’s preference.