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How to convert recipes between sourdough and yeast
Don’t let sourdough versus commercial yeast stop you from trying a recipe. As long as you’re willing to pay attention to the dough and ignore the recipe’s rising-time recommendations, you can make a yeast recipe with sourdough starter and vice versa. I’m going to use the term “starter” throughout these instructions to refer to mature levain/starter.
To convert a recipe and retain the same hydration, you just need to figure out how much flour and water are in the starter, and move that flour and water into different ingredient categories. Unless otherwise indicated, most starter is half flour and half water by weight, but if the starter is dryer or wetter, you would simply divide the starter differently.
Of course, this is just a basic approach to get you going. Once you mix up a dough, you might decide you want to add more flour or water. I believe the safest course of action is to make a recipe at least once as it’s written to get a sense of dough-feel at different stages, but you can dive right into a converted recipe if you prefer.
If you don’t have a scale, make the recipe conversions in grams until you have your final ingredient list to avoid confusion, and then convert the grams to volume. Using the savory babka as an example again:
Divide the flour grams by 130 to get cups. 1 cup flour = 130g
375/130 = 2.88 cups flour
Divide the water and milk grams by 237 to get the cups. 1 cup water/milk = 237g
100/237 = 0.42 cups water
125/237 = 0.53 cups milk
You can find more weight-to-volume ingredient conversions online.
How to convert recipes between sourdough and yeast