Roy wrote:

>Look, its hard to find a sourdough bakery using 100% levain in the
>preparation of natually fermented bread,which only refreshes their
>culture once a dayand do not even add bakers yeast to accelerate
>fermentation and proofing time. like what other bakeries are doing.
>Previously they admitted that they used to do that hybrid technique
>but not anymore with thier new culture...
>In conclusion the suppoeed vaunted superiority of knowledge of amateur
>and hobbyist sourdough bakers was shattered once more by this group
>of bakery tradesmen who do not give much importance about theory of
>bacterial growth <g>.
>
>
The odd thing here is that they are using, from what you said in an
earlier post, a pumpable starter. I know a number of bakeries that keep
their starter around 60% hydration, as opposed to the 100% common here.
It's more like a window putty than the starters we usually use. They
can get away with refreshing once a day with no problems, and the
starters are very active when put into use.

I've gone to keeping my master starter at 60% hydration, and it will
keep in the fridge for in excess of 5 months with no hooch formation,
and it still comes to life very quickly when used.

The other odd thing is that the German approach in smaller bakeries is
to feed their starter once a WEEK. And they use a pumpable starter
also. They seem to end each week with a fresh starter from a lab, feed
it up to the volume they will need for the next week, and let it work
over the weekend. Then they use what they need the next week, repeating
the cycle the next Friday. (This is based on information from Dr.
Ganzle in seminar notes from the Bread Baker's Guild of America.) And
those bakers don't use yeast to jazz up the sourdough, or sauerteich.

There's a lot of ways to use sourdough, levain, or sauerteich.

Mike