Recipe
Make a Poolish Mixture For Perfectly Easy Sourdough Bread
My secret weapon guarantees consistent success.
Sourdough bread is hard to make, or so I thought after I made several failed loaves. I began my starter at the beginning of the pandemic so that I would have bread to feed my family. For some reason, I couldn’t recreate the loaves all the professionals make in the YouTube videos.
I read cookbook after cookbook, blog posts, and watched countless videos trying to figure out what I was doing wrong. Then I stumbled across one video that talked about poolie. I discovered that, although my yeast was active, a poolie was even more active.
That extra bit of activity is what ensures a perfect loaf — every single time.
What is a poolish mixture?
A poolish mixture, or poolie, is a batch of super fed sourdough starter. You feed your starter as usual, but then you remove a small amount and feed that part more. This gives a few yeasty beasties a lot of food to eat. They feed voraciously and give off carbon dioxide, which provides the lift in your bread.
It’s kind of like feeding any pet. If you have four dogs and put all their food in one bowl, one dog may eat most of it, leaving less for the others…
