In general you call it a poolish because of the ratio ( 1 to 1 flour and water) whether using sourdough or yeast in the poolish. But people most often use the word poolish with commercial yeast and words like preferment with sourdough.

sorry, i meant poolish with sour doughstarter, isntead of poolish with yeast. isnt it just sourdough starter?

Hello Scott,
We want to suggest you put the poolish in the fridge straight after making it, and use it the following day when you come home. It might take a bit of tweaking to establish the optimum fridge time / amount of sourdough culture to add to the poolish. If it is very under-ripe when you want to use it, you can add some more, or you can add some hours of room temp fermenting, before you put it in the fridge. If it is still a bit under-ripe you can just use it in the recipe, you can always correct this in the final proofing. You just have to make sure it will not be over-ripe and turn to a soupy consistency, without the gluten structure needed to build a good dough.

Just give it a try, using the fridge to aid you and we hope it will be great!

if I make the poolish at night and let it sit for 12 hours could I put it in the fridge for 6 hours so I can then continue the recipe when I get home from work?

What would you recommend to break the process up so I can attempt weekday baking without needing to wake up at 3am to start the poolish

Thank you Sonia, and congrats on a great result. Very happy our recipe played a part in it.
If you like you can upload pictures of your result here:
www.weekendbakery.com/send-…your-loaf/

Happy sourdough baking!

Marieke

Thank you for your feedback on the recipe. One suggestion we have that you might try is (if possible) another type of flour. Make sure you use good strong bread flour with around 12.5 to 13% protein. Also make sure you have refreshed your sourdough culture the day before you are going to use it. Could be your culture is just a bit slower (they are all different) and you could benefit from using a bit more in the recipe and /or even longer proofing times. The combination with the right proofing temperature is important of course.

If the oven light does not seem to provide much warmth (it is best if you could measure the inside temp of the oven) you could also try to warm the oven for 20 seconds or so then turn it off and then put the dough in for proofing.
Find some more sourdough baking tips here: www.weekendbakery.com/posts…ough-tips/

Hope you keep on making the recipe because we are sure you will improve upon your first result. Our average for making a recipe our own with bread baking is between 5 to 10 times.

Enjoy your sourdough baking

Wonderful Rita, congratulations on the result!
It will never stop being great to hear from other bakers about their success with our recipes 🙂

Enjoy your baking journey,
Ed & Marieke

thanks SO much for your information! And recipies! I made this recipie a few days ago and it turned out AMAZING~!!! first time ever for me!

Hello Rita,
A banneton is for proofing and holding shape, NEVER for baking.
If you do not have a banneton / proofing basket, you can use a bowl as an alternative. The round baskets we use for this recipe have a diameter of around 20 cm / 7.9 inches.

Good luck with your sourdough baking.

Hello Judy,
This recipe makes one loaf with one batch of dough of 773 grams.
If you would want to make more loafs you can see that under the ingredients list you find the words ‘WKB Dough Calculator’.
When you click on it, it opens and you can very easily change the number of batches of dough to 2 or 4 or how many loafs you would want to make. The right weight of all the ingredients will show for the number of batches you choose.
We hope it will turn out great.
Enjoy your baking.

Thank you 😊

Hello Cathy,
If you refer to the jar to keep your sourdough culture in, any (jam) jar between 250 and 400 ML will do (somewhere between a quart and a pint).

That is a very good suggestion Cheryl, thank you for sharing.
A sourdough bread crust will in general always be thicker than a crust from a hybrid or regular yeast bread.