Levain and autolyse and alveoli, oh my!
Find yourself stumbling through all sorts of new terms while just trying to bake some bread?! It's easier than it seems, we promise. Get started by familiarizing yourself with the basic terms at the top, and then dive deeper in our Sourdough Geeks Encyclopedia when you're ready to move into a more complex bake.
Basic Sourdough Terms
Sourdough Starter
A stable, symbiotic culture of yeast and lactic acid bacteria existing in a medium of starch and water. A sourdough starter is used to make bread rise. It is created by combining flour and water and allowing it to ferment. Over time, the natural yeasts and bacteria present in the environment and on the flour begin to feed on the mixture. The process of creating a starter involves the collection and cultivation of a colony of yeast and bacteria from the environment and may take 2-4 weeks to become strong and mature enough to bake with as leavening. In the meantime, the starter is fed and some portion is removed.
Stretch and Folds
The most common method of building strength and gluten structure into dough at the beginning of the bulk fermentation by stretching an edge of dough upwards and then folding it on top of itself. Repeated around the edges of the dough 4-6 times every hour or so for 3-4 hours. The goal is to stretch the dough without tearing it, and to build adequate strength so that dough can be stretched thin into a translucent “window” without tearing.
Sourdough Starter Discard
The portion of dough that is removed to reduce total amount of starter to be fed (and therefore the wasting of water and flour) and which can be used on its own in so-called discard recipes, also to reduce waste. Mature discard may be used for leavening, although it will take longer to rise than fed starter. However, we recommend that the discard from the first few weeks of building a new starter should be disposed of and not used in any recipes.
Bulk Fermentation
Bulk fermentation begins with the addition of starter to a dough, and ends when dough is shaped or divided for shaping. It includes the period of time when the yeast are active in the dough, and ends when the dough has reached the desired level of elasticity and extensibility, and has increased in volume through the metabolism of starches by the yeast, which release gas. Some proportion of acid is also produced during this time, which contributes to flavor. Also referred to as bulk rise, this phase generally takes place at warm room temperature. Many of a bread’s characteristics, including the crumb texture, can be attributed to this phase, so the recognition of proper fermentation deserves extra attention in learning sourdough baking.
What's Next?
Read through our full Sourdough Geeks Encyclopedia and keep learning!
