Levain refers to a portion of a starter that has been recently fed and is ready to be used in a recipe. In other words, the portion of a starter used in bread is considered the levain while the portion that is kept is considered the starter.
It’s always an option to use your starter instead of making a levain. But, for most recipes, I prefer making a levain so I can control the flour going into the levain, the ripening timeline, and when I use it to mix into a dough—all of this without having to adjust my continually maintained sourdough starter.
The word levain comes from the French word “to rise”. It refers to the natural live cultures used to produce sourdough bread. Some people use the word “starter” interchangeably with the word levain; The term “mother” is also used.
Knead, let rise; shape into loaves for pans, let rise; bake. Since I don’t have a sourdough culture, I follow the recipe developer’s instructions found in a comment under the recipe: instead of making a levain with culture, water and flour, make a “preferment” using a pinch of baker’s yeast, flour and water.
I find that if I let this initial build go too long, I get a very slack dough without the structure to hold up as well as usual. It’s definitely a fine balance to strike sometimes. I’d let it go until it gets to the look/feel you’re used to when you bake without retarding it. I would definitely check it after 24 hours.
Pronunciation
IPA: /lə.vɛ̃/Audio. 0:01. (file)
Place the levain in a lightly oiled bowl, cover it, and allow it to ferment overnight at room temperature (65°F to 75°F). It should take the levain about 12 hours to mature. The mature levain will have doubled in size and be domed on top, or just beginning to sink in the middle.
You don’t need to stir on schedule, but whenever it’s convenient, give it a little stir, whether it’s a couple times a day or a dozen because you happen to be in the kitchen.
Once you’ve successfully created your starter, you’ll need to feed it regularly. If you bake a lot of sourdough treats, you may want to keep it on your counter, at room temperature. While this means feeding it twice a day, it also means your starter will be ready to bake with at the drop of a hat (er, oven mitt).
While our standard County Sourdough recipe has 16.6% of the total flour pre-fermented in the levain, our less sour version has a much smaller levain, containing only 10.5% of the total flour, while our more sour bread has a large levain containing 35% of the total flour.
In a Nutshell. Simply put, a sourdough mother or starter, and levain, are both preferments consisting of flour, water, naturally occurring yeast and bacteria, that require time. Each contributes its own unique flavor to your bread.
Sourdough bread begins with a starter affectionately known since time began as The Mother (aka madre, the seed, the levain). It’s a very simple mixture of wild yeast, bacteria, flour (50% white and 50% wholemeal) and water.
This shows grade level based on the word’s complexity. a substance, as yeast or baking powder, that causes fermentation and expansion of dough or batter. fermented dough reserved for producing fermentation in a new batch of dough.
Dough can be left to autolyse from 10 minutes to 5 hours or more. But as with many aspects of bread baking, autolysis can be done in different ways and can give different results.
Try to feed the starter at roughly the same time each day. Stir the mixture occasionally if your schedule allows. Day 1 – Thoroughly mix 100g filtered room temperature water with 100g flour in a bowl at least twice the size of the mixture. Loosely cover with a dishtowel or similar and set in a warm (but not hot) spot.
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