A smaller portion of dough that is allowed to ferment and is then added to the main bread dough. Preferments are used to enhance the flavor, handling properties, keeping quality or development time of the final bread. To make it confusing, a piece of fully mixed dough that has all the final ingredients (flour, water, yeast and salt) can be put aside and allowed to ferment for use in bread made the following day. This type of preferment is ironically also called “preferment” or “pate fermentee” or “old dough”. Other types of preferments are “Poolish” and “Biga”.
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