re: Baking Bread 101: Beginning a sourdough starter (pics)

Your starter is your yeast—incorporate it like you would a dry yeast. Mix it with the liquid ingredients, then add the flour. Dump it into the liquid, swish around to mix it with the water so that it will be evenly dispersed throughout the dough.

Stirring it down serves no purpose. Just add the appropriate amount by weight (never volume, as it is horribly inaccurate).

If you just plop the starter atop a dough that’s partially mixed, you’ll just have to work harder to get it distributed in the dough.

I hand mix 6 loaves at a time in a 10 qt round cambro. I add water, levain, and stir (with my hand). Then add the flour(s), rough mix w/hand. Let autolyse for 30 mins, then add salt (and sometimes additional water, if it’s a mostly whole grain dough). I then do a stretch and fold each 30 mins for the next 1.5 hrs (that’s 3 s&fs after the initial one). It sits out for another hour or two (depends on when I go to sleep), and I put it in the fridge before retiring.

It rests in the fridge until 12-1:30, I take it out, divide, rough shape, final shape, then proof in baskets for 3.5-4 hrs (depending on ambient temp in kitchen). I bake in batches and in hottest summer, some of the shaped loaves must be refrigerated again prior to baking or they will overproof before I can get them into the oven.

This schedule works for me...there are a whole bunch of ways you can adapt it to work for you. When I make pain au levain w/ no commercial yeast, I sometimes do a room temp bulk rise and an overnight refrigerated shaped rise. Those loaves are always gorgeous—terrific oven spring, scores open up dramatically, etc. But shaped loaves in baskets take up quite a bit of fridge space.