Uploaded April 2020 | Updated September 2026, 5 days ago
In this video you will learn how to make a poolish - a yeast based pre-ferment that adds superb flavour to your bread. This definitely elevates every yeast based dough.
A poolish is a yeast based pre-ferment that you can use to add great flavour to your bread. A poolish works excellent with baguettes, croissants and even regular buns. The flavor added by a poolish is so intense, the bread has a very yeasty scent to it. Plus - once you created your poolish you can keep re-feeding it - you no longer have to buy yeast.
Overall it takes 24 hours to make it. You can also let your poolish sit for a longer period of time, this would improve taste of your bread even further. At some point though there is no food left for your yeast, activity of your poolish will decline.
For all the recipes you plan to bake I recommend 20% poolish calculated based on the flour mass. So let's say you plan to make a bread with 500 grams of flour, you will need 100 grams of poolish. A poolish always has equal parts of flour and water. Meaning you will need 50 grams of water and 50 grams of flour. Add 1% of dry yeast calculated based on the poolish mass, so 1 gram of dry yeast.
You might have also heard other terms like biga, or sponge. They are all the same except that the hydration in your pre-ferment might be slightly different. I prefer the poolish because it is a drop in replacement for the sourdough breads.
Then just bake like how you would normally do using a sourdough bread.
Happy baking.
In this video you will learn how to make a poolish - a yeast based pre-ferment that adds superb flavour to your bread. This definitely elevates every yeast based dough.
A poolish is a yeast based pre-ferment that you can use to add great flavour to your bread. A poolish works excellent with baguettes, croissants and even regular buns. The flavor added by a poolish is so intense, the bread has a very yeasty scent to it. Plus - once you created your poolish you can keep re-feeding it - you no longer have to buy yeast.
Overall it takes 24 hours to make it. You can also let your poolish sit for a longer period of time, this would improve taste of your bread even further. At some point though there is no food left for your yeast, activity of your poolish will decline.
For all the recipes you plan to bake I recommend 20% poolish calculated based on the flour mass. So let's say you plan to make a bread with 500 grams of flour, you will need 100 grams of poolish. A poolish always has equal parts of flour and water. Meaning you will need 50 grams of water and 50 grams of flour. Add 1% of dry yeast calculated based on the poolish mass, so 1 gram of dry yeast.
You might have also heard other terms like biga, or sponge. They are all the same except that the hydration in your pre-ferment might be slightly different. I prefer the poolish because it is a drop in replacement for the sourdough breads.
Then just bake like how you would normally do using a sourdough bread.
Happy baking.
