The Bread Baker's Apprentice

If you keep back a 200g piece of dough when you make your first batch of bread, you can leave it in the fridge, ‘refreshing it’ from time to time, to develop its flavour.

As your starter ferments the flour, at some point (about 12 hours for the process described in this book) more fresh flour needs to be added so the microbes have a continued food source.

Time is a critical factor in the production of all of these compounds. What we are looking for is the fermentation “sweet spot.” Too much time can throw the flavor elements out of balance, whereas not enough time diminishes their development in the first place. When a dough is overdeveloped, the alcohol becomes too strong, overpowering the sweetnes

The second big shift in my thinking was to come from everyone in Naples: rather than mixing the dough and letting it rest for several hours to rise (what we call bulk fermentation), it is customary to mix the dough and then divide and shape it into dough balls early on in the fermentation timeline, often just 2 hours later.

Your freshly mixed levain weighs 450 grams. Each recipe in this book uses either 50 grams / ¼ cup or 100 grams / ½ cup of this culture. When it’s time to refresh the culture, use the same container as its permanent home. Don’t wash out the container; just remove all but 50 grams / ¼ cup of what is left in there, add more flour and water, and mix by