Lievito madre

I was recently asked (on Mastodon) how I prepare my lievito madre, and how I make pizza from it. The answer takes a few more characters than my instance’s post limit, so I might as well put it here. Now, I’m not Italian, I’m just a baking nerd, so please take whatever you read here with a pinch of salt and don’t get into an argument with your nonna about it.

In case you haven’t heard, lievito madre is simply the Italian take on sourdough. The fun bit about it is that isn’t sour at all, and you can thus use it for all sorts of baked goods including sweets.

Making lievito madre is not difficult, if you have access to wholemeal wheat or spelt flour. But it does take a bit of patience. Actually, a fair bit of patience.

Here’s how I go about it.

Bootstrapping

To bootstrap a starter, you mix 60g of wholemeal flour with 30g of water and 5g of honey.¹ Mixed, it turns into a squishy ball. Dab some olive oil on your palms and roll the ball between them, so that a thin film of oil covers the ball. Put that ball into a glass jar and close the lid.

Nourishment

What follows now is a matter of some debate. Some say that throughout the cycle of feeding the fresh starter, it should be kept refrigerated, which means the whole process takes 6-8 weeks. I think you’re perfectly fine developing your starter at room temperature, and only refrigerate it later. This tends to get you a pretty potent starter within about half that time.

At any rate, until your starter has developed some leavening power, you repeat the following process every day or two: You take 30g from your developing starter and dissolve it in 30g of water, to which you add another 5g of honey. Then, you add 60g of wholemeal flour and work it all into a ball again, covering it with another thin layer of olive oil. You discard the rest of your starter.²

After about a week or so, you’ll notice that the starter will approximately double in volume in about 24 hours at room temperature. At that point, your culture is well developed and is no longer at risk of collapse, and will only require feeding. If you’re going to bake mostly with white flour, you may at this stage want to also switch to feeding your starter with that. So, on your next feeding cycle, you simply replace the wholemeal with white flour.

After a few more repetitions of that, your starter will probably reliably double in volume in 24 hours at room temperature. But you’re not quite done yet, because you want your starter to be potent enough to do the same while refrigerated. So, you keep the same feeding pattern, but after every replenishment of your starter you now return it to the fridge at 6 to 8°C. Eventually, your starter will have enough leavening capacity that it will triple to quadruple in volume in 24 hours at that temperature.

Baking arithmetic

Then you can start baking. What might you want to bake? Pizza, of course.

My standard quantities for pizza dough are as follows. (These are per adult person; multiply as needed. Children under 10 count like half an adult.)

• 125g flour
• 20g activated sourdough
• 75ml water
• 4g salt

Now there’s a little arithmetic to be done here, for the purposes of preparation.

Suppose I am baking pizza for 10 people.

This means I will need 200g of sourdough, and at any time I’ll have about 120g in my jar. So the night before I make pizza, I’ll take what’s in my jar, and put it in bowl, dissolve it in 55g of water and add 55g of flour. Then, I let it sit overnight in a covered bowl until it’s nice and bubbly. Next morning, I now have 230g of activated sourdough. Of this I take 30g, mix it with 30g of water and 60g of white flour, and that’s my starter for next time. It goes into the jar, and back into the fridge. (It takes less than 24 hours to be ready for baking again.)

The remaining 200g sourdough get whisked into 750ml of tepid water, and then mixed and kneaded with 1,250g of flour and 40g of salt.

This big ball of dough again gets a thin layer of olive oil so it’s easier to get in an out of the bowl, and is then allowed to rise at room temperature for another 3-4 hours. (Maybe stretch and fold every hour or so, but I consider this less than strictly necessary.) Then split into 10 portions of about 225g each, roll them in flour, and off we go with pizza. Or calzone, if you prefer.