Flavour & Fire
The Sourdough Journal
From Starter to Levain
From your everyday starter to a fermentation built specifically for one loaf.
Your starter may have been living in the same jar for weeks or months. You feed it, watch it rise and fall again, and keep it in the fridge when you are not baking. Slowly, it becomes part of the rhythm of your kitchen.
But when you are ready to make a loaf, you do not necessarily have to bake with exactly the starter sitting in that jar. You can take a small portion and use it to build a new, temporary fermentation: a levain.
It may sound as though you are adding a complicated extra step to your sourdough process. In reality, it is simply another way of working with your starter. You use a small amount of a healthy, active culture as your starting point, then give it enough flour, water and time to reach the quantity and characteristics you need for a particular loaf.
What Is a Levain?
A levain is a separate quantity of fermented flour and water that you build from your existing sourdough starter and then use to make dough.
You can think of it as a temporary branch of your mother starter.
Your mother starter stays in its jar and remains the living culture you continue to maintain. A levain is built specifically for a bake and eventually disappears into the dough. In that sense, a levain is not simply another word for starter.
The confusion mainly comes from the fact that both are living fermentations, and recipes do not always use the terms in exactly the same way. Some bakers call their everyday starter a levain once it is being used for a loaf, while others always build a separate levain. In practice, what matters most is the role that fermentation is playing at that particular moment.
Your mother starter is the culture you keep. Your levain is the culture you build for a particular loaf.
Starter, Baking Starter and Levain
Within sourdough, you will come across several names for what can look like much the same thing, but their purpose can differ.
A mother starter is your small, ongoing culture. You keep a portion of it so that you can continue feeding it and maintaining it over time.
A baking starter is an amount of active starter that you build specifically because you need it for a recipe. It can simply be a larger quantity built from your mother starter.
A levain is also a purposeful build, but it is often created with a particular amount of starter, flour, water and time to suit a specific dough.
The terms are not strictly standardised everywhere. It is therefore more useful to understand what you are building than to worry too much about which word someone uses for it.
The principle remains simple: you take a small active culture, give it fresh food and time, and allow it to grow into the quantity you need.
Why Build a Levain?
The main reason is control.
You do not need to keep your entire mother starter large enough for every loaf you might want to bake. You can keep it small and manageable, then build the amount you need when it is time to bake. That means less waste and more freedom.
A levain can also be adapted to the loaf you want to make. You might use a different flour from the one you normally feed your mother starter, change the ratio of starter, flour and water, or adjust the timing to suit your baking day.
Your starter therefore becomes more than something you simply maintain. It becomes a tool you can work with.
From a Small Amount to a Full Levain
Suppose your mother starter is healthy and active.
You might take 25 grams of starter and add 50 grams of flour and 50 grams of water. You now have 125 grams of levain.
The ratio is 1:2:2: one part existing starter, two parts flour and two parts water.
The number itself is not magic. You could use a different ratio depending on how much time you have, how warm your kitchen is and when you need the levain to be ready.
What matters is understanding what the ratio does.
More fresh food in relation to the amount of existing starter generally means more food is available and can mean that the levain takes longer to reach its peak. Using relatively more existing starter can make fermentation get going more quickly.
This gives you a way to work with time without having to change your entire recipe.
Choosing Your Flour
A levain does not have to contain exactly the same flour as your mother starter.
You can build a white levain for a lighter loaf, use some wholegrain flour for additional flavour and nutrients, or introduce rye when it suits the dough you are making.
That does not mean that every flour will automatically produce a better or more active levain. Different flours vary in their nutrients, water absorption and fermentation behaviour.
The colour and texture of your levain can also change when you use a different flour. That is not a problem; it is simply part of working with different ingredients.
In fact, this is one of the useful things about a levain: your mother starter can remain stable while you build something slightly different for each loaf.
How Much Levain Do You Need?
Start with your recipe. If your loaf calls for 100 grams of active starter, for example, you can build slightly more than 100 grams of levain so that you have enough for the dough and a little left over.
Those last few grams can be useful. You do not want to discover at the last moment that you have used exactly everything in your dough and have nothing left to continue your mother starter. A small amount of extra gives you some room to work with.
There is therefore no need to automatically build a large jar of levain. Build what you need, plus a small margin.
The Time Between Building and Baking
A levain needs time to ferment. Exactly how long depends on several factors: the amount of starter you begin with, the amount of fresh food, the temperature of your kitchen, the flour you use and the level of maturity you are looking for.
That means you cannot reliably plan every levain around one universal number of hours.
You may come across a recipe that says a levain should, for example, sit for eight hours. That may work perfectly in the writer’s kitchen. In a cooler kitchen, the same levain may need longer; in a warm kitchen, it may reach its peak much sooner.
The clock is therefore a guideline.
Your levain tells you when it is ready.
Learning to Read Your Levain
This is where everything you have already learned about your starter comes together. Look at the bubbles. Look at the rise. Pay attention to the texture and aroma. And above all, look at the pattern.
A young levain may appear to do almost nothing at first. Then small bubbles begin to appear, the volume starts to increase and the structure becomes lighter. Eventually, it reaches a clear peak. After that peak, it will gradually begin to fall again.
You do not have to wait until it looks spectacular. Nor do you need to wait for it to double exactly. The height of a levain depends on the flour, hydration, structure and shape of the jar.
What you are looking for is a levain that is clearly active and behaving as you have come to expect from a healthy fermentation.
When Is Your Levain Ready?
A good levain is generally active, airy and full of life. You will see bubbles throughout the structure and a clear increase in volume. The aroma will be pleasantly fermented — sour, yoghurt-like, fruity or lightly alcoholic, depending on the stage of fermentation.
The precise moment when you use it depends on the recipe and on what you want to achieve with your dough.
Many bakers use a levain around its peak, when fermentation is highly active. Other recipes may deliberately call for a younger or more mature levain. There is therefore no single magical moment when every levain in the world is “ready”.
What you ultimately learn is the relationship between how you built it, how warm it is, what it looks like and what your bread needs.
And What Happens to Your Mother Starter?
Nothing unusual.
That is the beauty of it.
You take a small portion from your mother starter to build your levain. Afterwards, you feed your mother starter according to the routine that suits your normal maintenance rhythm. Your mother starter simply continues to exist.
In fact, keeping a small mother starter makes the whole system more manageable. You do not need to maintain a large quantity of starter every day just because you occasionally want to bake a loaf.
The larger quantity only comes into existence when you need it.
A Levain Is Not a Requirement
Not every sourdough recipe needs a separate levain.
Some recipes work directly with an active starter. You take a certain amount from your jar, build the quantity if necessary, and then use it in the dough. Other recipes are specifically designed around a separate levain with a particular ratio, flour or fermentation time. Neither approach is automatically better.
What matters is understanding what the recipe is trying to achieve. A levain is not an extra step you need to add to make your baking more “authentic”. It is simply a way of building your fermentation with a specific purpose.
From Levain to Dough
Once your levain is ready, it comes together with the rest of your ingredients: flour, water, salt and the fermentation culture you have just built.
From that moment, your levain is no longer something you maintain separately. It becomes part of the dough and begins its next stage. And really, that is the beautiful simplicity of the whole system.
You keep a small living culture alive. When you want to bake, you take a little of it. You give it fresh food, let it grow, and in the process learn to pay attention to what is happening.
From starter to levain.
From levain to dough.
And eventually, from dough to bread.
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