Hello Luke,
The poolish part is relatively small and more to add taste than to be a big part of the proofing. To get light and airy buns and doing the final proofing at a reasonable pace we do want to use the 8 grams of yeast in the final dough. You could use less and proof for longer, but the type of bread, we think, is better suited to this slightly ‘faster pace’.

Hello Jan,
Excellent, thank you for sharing. We want to show different methods also with the poolish, so you have options to do a two day or one day recipe.
We do have a handy table % for the amount of yeast with certain times and temperatures with our pizza recipe (if you have not seen it yet):
www.weekendbakery.com/posts…gh-recipe/

Lots of fun and success with the recipes and baking!

Great Jack, very happy you could improve with a bit of help from our tips.

Thank you so much! This was more than helpful!! I followed all of your advices and had a HUGE improvement!!! My oven is quite difficult to work with – turning the temp down once the colour was there was a genius suggestion – previously I’d always taken them out for fear of a burnt top.
Thank you again SO much, can’t tell you how helpful!

Hello Jack,
Hope we can help you with that. First mission is to get the perfect level of proofing. So be bold and maybe take it a notch further than you would normally do. Then there’s the baking and the oven. You need to know the true temperature of your oven for it could well be that there is something not quite right with the indication of the temp and the true temp. You can do this by using a ‘true temp’ oven thermometer (they will cost about 5 to 10 euro or dollar). If possible, the (top of the) buns should be further removed from the heat source. Make sure your oven is well enough preheated, avoid opening the door during baking and try to create steam so the buns can also expand in the oven during the first stage of baking. Always bake them for the full amount of time, but as soon as they have a good golden color, turn down your oven temp to 180C for the remainder of the cooking time, but leave them in the oven.
You can also measure the core temp of your bun with a digital probe thermometer. The ideal average bread core temperature should read 93.3C / 200F at the end of the cooking time.
Hope we gave you something to work with and you will see improved results soon.

Enjoy your Easter baking too!

Hello Ash,
For this you need a very small amount of yeast, you can use about one tenth to one fifth of the amount given in the recipe (depending on the room temp), so 0.1 to 0.2 grams of yeast. You can see what that looks like here: www.weekendbakery.com/posts…lish-biga/
Your poolish can be a bit under-proofed when you use it, that is no problem (much better than over-proofed of course because then the gluten will be damaged).
Hope it will turn out great!

Helemaal duidelijk dank je wel.

Hallo Linda,
Ja je vraag is heel goed. Het klopt helemaal dat je minder gist kunt toevoegen bij het gebruik van een poolish, maar je kijkt bij het recept ook naar hoeveelheden en tijden. In dit geval hebben we gekozen voor een een-daags recept met een poolish met een relatief korte fermentatietijd. Daarbij is het percentage poolish ook wat kleiner. In het uiteindelijke deeg hebben we om deze reden en om de eind-rijstijd niet te lang te laten zijn, ook een wat grotere hoeveelheid gist.

Het zijn allemaal keuzes, gebaseerd op effect, snelheid, smaak et cetera.
Je kunt ook een poolish maken met minder gist en deze een hele nacht laten ontwikkelen. Of minder gist in het einddeeg doen en langer laten rijzen. Je moet altijd wel beseffen dat er dan uiteindelijk niet minder gist in je brood zit, want de gisten ontwikkelen / vermeerderen zich weer met meer tijd. Je gebruikt alleen initieel minder gist.

We laten zien met verschillende recepten dat je deze keuzes kunt maken.
Kijk maar eens naar dit brood: www.weekendbakery.com/posts…same-loaf/
Daar zie je weer langere tijden en minder gist bv.

Hello Pearlans,
We would advice never to go over 50% for the stability of the end product. We cannot give you the exact percentages based on experience, but you could also try a version where you would make the entire dough the day before with low yeast and let it develop in the fridge overnight. This way you would also use a small amount of yeast and develop good taste. You would have to experiment with the amount, also depending on time and fridge temperature.

Enjoy the baking and experimenting!

Thanks once again n surely I’ll share my bakes.
Lol!! Bhavana

Hello Bhavana,
Thank you for sharing and lovely to hear you are so happy with the method and your results. We saw the picture and they indeed look extremely fluffy!

If you ever want to share some pictures with us and other bakers on our website you can do so here too: www.weekendbakery.com/send-…your-loaf/

Happy baking and sharing from Holland to India 🙂

Marieke & Ed

Hello John,
Thank you for your comment. The second sentence we always add to our recipes was somehow missing: “At what stage you preheat your oven depends on how long it takes for your oven to heat through, some take 30 minutes, some, like ours, with stone floors take a lot longer, up to two hours”.
We added this sentence right away. We preshape and then round the balls then proof them, but do not flatten them, like it says above. But of course you could flatten them if you prefer. If it is still unclear, please just let us know and thank you again for pointing this out.

Enjoy the baking,

Marieke