No absolutely no need to add sugar. In general it is not customary to add sugar to a preferment like a poolish or biga. High concentrations of sugar can even inhibit the growth of yeast. But if you add just a little bit, you also do not have to be afraid that anything will go wrong with your bake.

Enjoy your baking

Hello Richard,
Looking at our own favorite baguette recipe (www.weekendbakery.com/posts...-baguette/) and many other bread recipes, we never add any sugar or salt to a preferment. Salt is an inhibitor and adding sugar would make the yeast more active, but in most bread recipes (except specific bakes like panettone) you are not looking to speed things up during this phase.
We found that maximum taste is gotten mainly by two things:
1. Using high quality (organic) flour – we did many tests with different flours and with exactly the same process and recipe you get a totally different result, the best flour giving way better taste and complexity (you can even taste it in the raw flour, the best taste like ‘plant’ the very cheap, bleached kind taste like nothing).
2. Time equals taste, so things like cold proofing / fermenting in the fridge will also add to the complex taste profile. Plus just the right amount of salt (too much overpowers too little will go towards bland).

Hope this helps.
Enjoy your baguette baking and experimenting

Hello Andres,
What it says in the example is: You first calculate 1% of 200g of flour by dividing 200 g by 100. And then you multiply by the amount in the table which in the example is 0,1.
The calculation to get to the result is then as follows:
200 / 100 (= 2) x 0.1 = 0.2 g instant yeast

So in short
amount-of-instant-yeast = amount-of-flour / 100 x percentage-of-table

Let us know if there is anything else

Hello Kees,
We want to encourage you to make as much pizza dough with different techniques as possible, to see what you like best yourself.
We have a very helpful schedule with times, temperatures and yeast % for all kinds of scenarios here:
www.weekendbakery.com/posts...gh-recipe/
If you want to work with a poolish, we recommend using 20-30% for a pizza dough. But also try the 24 hour recipe (without the poolish).
There are many ways, leading to a good pizza.

Good luck with your pizza business

Good Morning,
You can find our recipe for pizza dough with a poolish here:
www.weekendbakery.com/posts...a-poolish/

Selamat Makan

Hello Jorge,
No that is not what we mean. Using up to 50% preferment will have benefits, like the chewiness, depth of taste, shelf life et cetera. Depending on the recipe / formula and the desired outcome (and your own taste) you can add a very small % preferment to your recipe or can go very high (up to 50%) of the final dough. You could say that these benefits stop at some point and it is no use to go higher than adding 50%. That said, you can find recipes and experiments that go over 50% preferment. There is a whole world to explore and lots of baking to do, to establish what works best with any given recipe and what would be your own personal preference.
What we wanted to show here, is the right amount of yeast to use in your preferment / poolish, because it is most important to get the development stage just right, when adding it to your final dough.

Enjoy your baking and experimenting

You mean that 50% or lower of % preferment in the final dough will produce a less chewy final dough?

And from 50% to 100% preferment (100% in case of biga or some sponges) the chewiness will increase?

I understood right? Thanks!

Thank you for sharing Robin, we also want to keep encouraging bakers to use scales, for big and small amounts!

Thank you Susan,
Baby steps is exactly the pace we would advice. And enjoying the journey of course.
And in case you have not spotted them yet, these are our other general baking tips :
www.weekendbakery.com/posts...king-tips/

Happy baking!

As bakers, we do consider baking to be an exact science and as such we personally like the idea of measuring everything, even the tiny amounts. Using spoons means you can deviate up to 20% compared to using scales. If you want to be consistent in baking we have found we cannot do without our scales.

Interesting. A standard measure of yeast is 2.5tsp which is 7gm. So that’s 0.7gm per 1/4tsp, or 0.35 per 1/8tsp. A tsp of water is a gnat’s hair under 5gm, so 1/8tsp water weighs 0.625gm. 100 of these add up to 62.5gm. Fully dissolve your 1/8tsp in that and you get 0.028gm yeast per teaspoon. Do the math to get the fractional amount of yeast you want; 4tsp gets you 0.112gm, just over 1/10gm of yeast.
Do we really need that level of precision?

Hello Lucian,
Thank you very much. A good indication would be between 0.5 (18 hours) and 0.3 percent (24 hours).
You can also check out our table percentage that we use for pizza, that is also a good starting point for your poolish.
See: www.weekendbakery.com/posts...gh-recipe/
Hope it will turn out great and your summer will be enjoyable and not too hot.

Greetings from Holland