Pictured: my last pizza bake. Sourdough.
Ok so Ive been seeing lots about poolish on this thread and sometimes I feel my sourdough can be a little sluggish and end up under proofed..
I was wondering if it's work trying a sourdough poolish, I suppose it's just a large sourdough levain?
My starter should be peaked at around 330/4pm today. I want to bake pizzas tomorrow around 430/5pm.
Could I make a sourdough poolish this afternoon when my starter has peaked, so that it's ready to mix into my final dough tomorrow morning? About 16 hours for the poolish, then that would leave about 8-9 hours for bulk, ball and final proof. All this will be at room temp of about 20c..
I'm just not sure about how to time it? For 16 hour poolish how much starter would I use (in bakers %) and then how much poolish would I use in my final dough for a. 8-9 hour total fermentation time?
Usually I just do about 5-6% sourdough starter in my dough to give me a total of about 24hour fermentation at room temp..
Or am I wasting my time and I should just do straight sourdough like usual??
Any tips would be greatly appreciated, mostly I just don't know how to time these fermentation based on starter/poolish %
Thanks!
by subconscious_kg
2 Comments
R/sourdough is probably a better resource to get actual answers to this question.
Pizza looks good! What are you trying to actually improve?
Not sure what difference you mean by “straight sourdough” vs sourdough poolish. A sourdough starter is the same thing as a poolish, 1:1 flour to water mix w yeast. I typically bump up my starter size into the size poolish I need for my formula, and for sourdough pizza use that in place of the traditional poolish. You do have to find the sweet spot though with the % sourdough poolish in total formula vs the ferment/proofing time. When I started using sourdough I was using a high (50%) poolish formula and it over proofed way too quickly and I was left with completely unusable ‘rubber’ balls. Once I dialed it back to 20% starter/poolish I started getting decently proofed balls to with. That’s with all with a warm (70F) 8 hr ferment. All depends on your formula vs proofing schedule & temps though, you can make adjustments on either: high starter/poolish % can work by using a faster and/or colder ferment, or dial the starter/poolish % back and use a warmer and/or longer ferment.