Know Your Ingredients

Know Your Ingredients

Have you ever run into an ingredient in a recipe and wondered, "What's that?" Then this page is for you. As we add recipes to our home page, we'll add more ingredients to this page.

Many recipes at sourdoughhome call for Active Sourdough Starter - so, what's an active sourdough starter? An active starter is one that has fed within the past 12 hours, and that is active enough that it was able to double in size after that feeding. If you fed your starter and it didn't double, you should feed it a few more times. I also suggest you check out the pages on maintaining or caring for your starter.

Altus according to George Greenstein's "Secrets of a Jewish Baker", altus is the secret of good rye bread. Altus is left-over ground-up rye bread, soaked in water. To make altus, cut the crusts from a loaf of bread, soak it in water for several hours, or overnight, under refrigeration. It will keep several weeks under refrigeration. Use small amounts in bread dough, pressing water out of it. This will intensify the taste of the rye bread, make it a moister bread. You will have to adjust the hydration of your dough when you use altus, probably adding a bit more flour.

Biga is Italian for poolish except the biga is usually very firm. The firmness gives the biga a nutty taste.

Biga Natural is the same as levain, but in Italian.

Chef is a dough-like starter that is either an unrefreshed levain or a piece of dough saved from the previous day's bake.

Flour is usually ground wheat, however, it may be almost any grain ground into a light powder. The most commonly used grains include wheat, rye, barley, rice, spelt (a primitive wheat), kamut (another primitive wheat), and oats. Wheat is the most commonly used bread flour at this time because it provides the best rise because of the quantity and type of gluten in the grain.

If someone specifies "flour" in a recipe, without other qualifications, this is usually a white wheat flour. However, this has tremendous variation from one part of the United States to another, and even wider variation from one country to another. French and Italian breads are usually made with flours that have between 7 and 9% protein. Most all purpose flours in the United States have around 10% protein. And bread flours have around 14%. As a result, experimentation with a recipe may be necessary to get the results you want.

Levain is a chef that has been refreshed with flour and water.

Mother is is a batter like starter of flour and water that is unrefreshed.

Poolish is French for a mixture of flour and water and a little bakers yeast. The ratio of flour to water is 50 - 50 by weight.

Sour is a mother that has been refreshed with flour and water.

A bit more discussion of starters and sponges. First, there are some equivalancies to be aware of:

Mother = chef - it only depends on the consistency - a chef is dough-like, while a mother is batter-like. Most people in the USA ignore the subtleties and just call this starter.

Sour = levain - again it depends on the consistency of the starter - a Sour batter-like, levain dough-like. The difference between these terms and the ones above is that they represent the term that indicates that the starter is activated.

Chef, levain, biga natural, mother, and sour contain only natural yeast cultures.

All of the above - biga, biga natural, chef, levain, mother, poolish, and sour are often referred to as either starters or sponges.