Bread from levain

The pet levain is knocked back to being a Chihuahua but it keeps wanting to be a Saint Bernard, presently it is about a Springer Spaniel, I would say. 

It is an active pet that way but slow because I am slow. It has managed to survive on my schedule of one feeding a day that does not double its bulk. I think it manages that by dying a little bit each day then coming back to life a little bigger. I could feed it once a day or I could feed it twice a day. I could even feed it three times a day and overall it would adjust to become a fast acting culture. Fast meaning a cycle of eight hours. 

This is 

* one cup of levain that is heated in a cup within a bowl of hot water, a hot water bath, to bring it up from room temperature to proofing temperature rapidly that is mixed into a new sponge that is started in the food processor. The sponge is

* one cup of hot water and one teaspoon of active dry yeast along with some food, a trace of sugar for rapid MRE deployment, and a teaspoon of powdered milk as a treat for the yeast, and flour to bulk up the sponge. To get a quick start, dessert, salad, meal from the yeast's pov. It is a near dough. Once it foams, then the levain and the rest of the 

* flour sufficient to stiffen it all to bread dough is added in increments, but a wet bread dough. Sticky wet dough, that's the way to go here. It should form a blob that flattens. Then of course

* salt to suit your own salt preferences, but it will need salt. This sticky dough picked up

* olive oil from the work surface that became part of the bread. The blob is spread out and covered to proof for an hour. This went too far again. I do that sometimes. It's a problem. This overproofed. Nevertheless, it was borderline overproofed, so the dough was divided as usual, shaped into loaves, and proofed again as loaves. These would not do so well on the second proof because the dough was overproofed before the loaves were formed. That is evident in the last photo, the skin that would become the crust is not stretched, it is the underside brought to the surface and pinched with no actual shaping involved because the sponge was overproofed and ready to completely deflate. With 50% levain in it the dough would not be able to recover if it were completely compressed. Another way to say that is the sourdough portion is a one-shot deal so this is 50% of a one-shot deal and the 50% that is not one-shot was blown by letting it overproof by an hour. One hour does make a difference with the commercial yeast this time because now 50% of it is levain. Dough from 100% levain is not elastic at all and the one-shot aspect it has to it is not at all forgiving. 

This seems like a lot of bread from the train of bread emanating from the crock of levain but I'm not eating it all. Two of those last round were taken again. Last night my last loaf was taken so were it not for this I'd be breadless.