Can I modify a bread recipe to use "the sponge method"

hey, folks. I am enjoying Greg Patent's "Baking in America". Great bread recipes turn out super every time. Most of his bread recipes use "the sponge method". But several do not. Do you think I can modify those successfully in order to use "the sponge method"?

Reply to
Dick from green lake wi
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Recipes, of course, can be adapted. How much experimentation would be necessary is the question. He favors sponges. The fact that he didn't use them for the specific recipes might mean that the results were better this way.

Pastorio

Reply to
Bob (this one)

I'm on a sourdough trip lately and use starter to make sponge all the time. The trick is that you must know precisely how much flour and water are in the sponge, and you will need an accurate scale and make sure to convert everything to grams. All you have to do is calculate the amounts of flour and water already in the amount of starter you plan to use and subtract those from the total called for in the recipe.

For example, I keep my starter at 150% hydration, which means for 100g of flour there is 150g of water. Last night I prepared a sponge for today for a loaf containing a total of 250g of flour (500cc or slightly over 2 cups). Depending on how firm or sticky you want the final dough to be, the typical hydration range is from 58% to 65%, and I chose 62% for this experiment. 250g * 0.62 = 155g of water. At a known 150% hydration level, the 60g of starter I used contained 20g flour and 40g of water. Therefore, I needed to add 230g of flour and 115g of water (along with the salt and oil) for the final dough.

Oh, and everyone tells me not to use salt in starter, it should contain only flour and water and of course the old starter used to innoculate it. You only add it to the final dough. BTW, sifted white wheat flour seems to weigh in grams almost exactly half as much as its volume in cubic centimeters (cc or ml), so a 3-cup recipe would be 237cc * 3 = 711cc / 2 = 356g. But I doubt it is exactly half, so you may need to tweak the hydration slightly after experimenting a bit.

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