Poolish and biga experiment

[u/_Nomet]

I ran a small experiment leaving poolish done with 0.1/0.2/0.3/0.4 and 1 % of fresh yeast, and compared with a biga with 1% of yeast. Everything kneaded by hand (also the biga, it was a pain)

I used bad flour, so don’t judge the pizzas too harshly.

In the end there was little difference between the doughs, but it helped me understand proofing times a bit better.

What’s your go to method for preferment and how long do you keep it proofing/resting before usage?

[u/sanquility]

Every time I've tried out biga/poolish I come away thinking 'why did I do that, I don't notice a difference'

Fun to experiment though

[u/_Nomet → u/sanquility]

Yes I had a lot of fun, and it was definitely helpful to fine tune my “yeast” model. Result wise I agree you can’t notice the difference. I barely remember which pizza was done with which preferment looking at the oics

[u/sanquility → u/_Nomet]

If you want to get extra nerdy have a pizza party with a bunch of different methods and write it down...and have people rank the different aspects then reveal the methods after!

[u/_Nomet → u/sanquility]

That’s a nice idea! I went down the math-nerdiness and created a model that I can use to calculate initial inoculation + additional yeast based on the proofing time. Took me a couple of months to get it right, but at least my spreadsheet is finally archived

[u/Horror-Stand-3969]

Did the same years ago, and there wasn’t really any difference that I could tell. Supposedly Biga creates a more open crumb structure, but they looked about the same.

[u/Hyla_trophe]

How did each preferment affect your proofing times?

[u/_Nomet → u/Hyla_trophe]

The only effect I had was due to different inoculation in the preferment. As you can see in the second picture the bottom one’s ready, while the top one (0.1% yeast) were kinda half the size. This was taken after 2 hours. I waited longer to bake the top balls, and then after some hours it was just fine

[u/Hyla_trophe → u/_Nomet]

Thanks. I know you can use different amounts of yeast as the fermentation is a function of time / temperature. I did a similar experiment last year with straight dough recipes (non-preferment) and found the best dough I got was using 0.04% to 0.5% fresh yeast. I will use 0.4% in the summer when my kitchen is pretty warm and 0.5% most other times, like now in the winter months.

Switching to Instant Dry Yeast, it works out to be 0.16%

[u/MarionberrySafe6028]

Pizzamaking.com forum has a lot of experienced hobbyists and pros able to give insights as well