If you’re reading this post, you certainly have created your mother yeast or sourdough starter, so… Well Done! Now, how do you use it? What can you bake?
There’s a hearsay telling that it’s very hard to understand how to use mother yeast…. but it’s absolutely not true! It’s very easy and here is the explanation.
The good thing is that you can use every recipe you want, just skipping “buy yeast”.
(Be aware that everything I write here is about mother yeast dough, not liquid)
If your mother yeast is in the fridge, let it rest for about 2 hours at room temperature to waking it up.
Take a piece of mother yeast (refresh and store the remaining part as usual), add liquids (water, milk, etc..) and mix a little bit. Add other ingredients (salt must always be mixed at the end and not in contact with yeast to avoid loss of strength).
One advice: dissolve mother yeast in warm water (or other liquids) before adding flour, otherwise if you add it directly to the flour it will lose its strength and will take much more time to resume.
Let rise the dough in a warm place (I usually put it in the oven with the light on – 100°F/37°C) near some ripe fruit (this help the rising process) or nothing if you’ve already baked something.
You can put the dough to rise in a cool place, but this will take longer and your dough will be more acidic (cool temperatures encourage development of acetic acid instead of lactic acid – for more information read what’s mother yeast page).
So if you have to delay the rising process I suggest to use less mother yeast but if you cannot do this put it in a warm place for almost half the rising process time, then put it in the refrigerator (just overnight and before using/bake it let rest at room temperature for at least 2 hours).
How much mother yeast you should use?
If you want your dough to rise in 3-4 hours add mother yeast to the ingredients in the amount of 40% of recipe flour (e.g. for 500gr of flour use 200gr of mother yeast – for 2 cups of flour use less than a cup of mother yeast).
For 4-6 hours use 25%, 6-8 hours use 15% and decrease so on… (the rising time depends also on your mother yeast strength, so don’t worry if your dough rise slowly, just refresh mother yeast 2-3 times before using it in recipes to strengthen it up).
The more you leave the dough to rise, the better results you have and this also applies for every kind of dough. Easy, isn’t it?
