Bread baked with pure dough or preference: which is better?

When you get ready to bake bread, you are immediately faced with a decision: How do I make the dough? There are two methods: straight dough and preference. (We will leave the sourdough for another day).

Pure dough means that you have assembled the ingredients for the bread and have made the bread without any interruption; You were straight from start to finish. Used properly, this method will produce very good bread. It’s what most people think of when they think of making bread. There is another way to make bread: use a preference.

One preference, as the name implies, is to mix a portion of the flour, yeast, and water to start the fermentation work before the main mix. The goal is to unlock all or most of the flour’s flavor by letting the yeast and flour develop over several hours or even days. There are four types of preferences: old dough, sponge, biga, and poolish.

Old dough is simply a portion of a batch of dough that is saved and incorporated into the next batch. If the dough weighs four pounds, you can remove six to eight ounces of dough, store it in the refrigerator or freezer, and use it for the next batch of bread. This method is mainly used when the baker bakes the same bread on successive days.

The sponge method involves mixing all the water and yeast and half the flour together, and then letting it develop for half an hour or a few hours. The sponge will be a loose dough that will bubble and expand. When the cake is ready to use, the baker adds the rest of the ingredients and continues to make the bread according to the recipe.

A biga is an Italian preference. Different traditions have different recipes for a biga, but we’ll use the classic definition, a fairly stiff dough, about 60% hydration (water weighs 60% of the weight of flour), and a small portion of yeast. This dough is allowed to develop for a period of time, from a few hours to a day or two, and is then incorporated into the dough. I use longer preference times for a biga than for the other methods. I think the relatively low hydration allows the yeast to continue to find nutrients to work with for longer than would be the case in others. This is subjective; I encourage you to experiment and see what works for you. Some Italian bread recipes specify a biga that is 100% hydrated, making it poolish, but who’s keeping score?

A poolish is similar to a biga, but it is made with a higher hydration, usually 100%; equal weights of flour and water with a little yeast. This mixture is left to develop for a few hours and is then used in the dough. I’ve built poolishes overnight and even over two days and they’ve been good, but I prefer to limit them to eight or ten hours.

One thing to remember is that we don’t use them for their power output, but for the flavor they add to the finished bread. These can go up and down, but that doesn’t really matter. What matters is that the fermentation process is brought forward and adds a lot of flavor to the dough and the bread.

Which one should you use? Many people use old dough, they save some of the dough from the brads they make and use it in the next batch. The baker must remember what is in the fridge and how old it is. I’ve never used this method much, but give it a try. I prefer to use the sponge if the recipe calls for it, as many British recipes do, or if I’m short on time. I use biga and poolish interchangeably, depending on the time I have to make the bread, the recipe and the whim.

There they are, oven techniques to help you bake better bread. Try the preferences the next time you bake bread; you will like the result.