Lievito Madre natural yeast

Organic Lievito Madre natural yeast

This natural yeast is a natural, fine powder, which forms a mild wheat sourdough by mixing with water and wheat flour. It can also be added to your bread in powder form. Lievito Madre is suitable for light bread and roll doughs, pizza and sweet yeast doughs, but also for dark bread doughs as a sourdough substitute.

Lievito Madre is versatile and very strong in leavening, which means that the dough rises very well and becomes nice and airy. So you can significantly reduce the amount of yeast or even omit it altogether.

Other advantages of Lievito Madre include greater dough stability and dough tolerance, a soft crumb, a special aroma and a longer-lasting end product.

Application and properties

Use Lievito Madre without batch for a basic bread recipe:

1 kg wheat flour 1050

75 g Lievito Madre

20 g salt

700-750 g water

Knead all ingredients into a smooth dough for 12-15 minutes at a slow pace. Put it in an oiled dough pan or bowl and let it rise at room temperature for about 12-14 hours. Once it has doubled in size, form 2 loaves and place them in a proofing basket. Now let the loaves rise again, covered, in a warm place for about 60-90 minutes. Then place the loaves on a baking sheet lined with baking foil and bake in the oven.

Bake in a wood-fired oven at 270 °C for 50 minutes. In an electric stone-baked oven, bake the loaves at 270 °C top heat and 190 °C bottom heat for 50 minutes. In a conventional household oven they bake at 250 °C for 15 minutes then reduce the temperature to 200 °C and let them bake out.

Use Lievito Madre as a sourdough starter:

10 g Lievito Madre

2x 20 g water

2x 40 g wheat flourv

Knead the natural yeast powder with 20 g water and 40 g wheat flour. Let this dough rise as warm as possible at about 28-30 °C for 12 hours. After the first resting time, add the remaining water and wheat flour, knead everything well again and let this rise for another 12 hours as warm as possible.

This process is called refreshing or feeding. It involves adding the same amount of water and flour to the total mass in 2 steps. This is very important because the dough needs enough time to rest, rise as well as to unfold.

The temperature also plays an important role. Note that you can ensure the temperature of 28-30 °C when preparing the Lievito Madre. The easiest way to do this is to use a temperature control device that allows you to set the exact temperature. If you do not have a temperature control device, you can use a bed bottle. On cold days and in winter, you can also place the dough on a radiator or a tiled stove. If nothing else is possible, you can also bake the dough in a heated oven without temperature.