Straight dough, poolish or biga: which to choose
Direct (what American bakers call a straight dough) means everything is mixed at once. A poolish is a wet preferment — equal weights of flour and water — made the day before. A biga is a stiff one, around 45% hydration. Poolish buys extensibility and a rounder flavor; biga buys strength and a more open, chewier crumb. Neither is better, and both cost you having to know tomorrow’s volume today.
The three methods
| Direct | Poolish | Biga | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Preferment hydration | — | 100% | 40 – 50% |
| Preferment time | — | 12 – 18 h | 16 – 24 h |
| Typical share of total flour | — | 20 – 40% | 30 – 50% |
| What it gives you | Control, simplicity | Extensibility, aroma | Strength, open crumb |
| Planning needed | None | A day ahead | A day ahead |
| Tolerance to error | High | Medium | Low |
Direct
Flour, water, salt, yeast, all in one go, then a long cold or room-temperature ferment. It is not the beginner’s option — most New York–style shops work straight dough with a day or more in the walk-in and never do anything else, and plenty of excellent Neapolitan places do too. What it gives you is control: one variable to change when something goes wrong.
Choose it if your volume moves unpredictably. A preferment made on Thursday for a Friday that does not show up is flour in the trash.
Poolish
Equal weights of flour and water with a very small amount of yeast, left 12 to 18 hours. It is ready when the surface domes and then just begins to dip in the middle — flat and collapsed means you have gone past it.
The result is a dough that opens easily and smells noticeably better. The trade is strength: a poolish dough is slacker, and if your flour is weak — an all-purpose rather than a bread flour — it will not hold a long final ferment on top.
Calculate a poolish for your batch
Biga
Stiff, barely hydrated, crumbly rather than pourable, left 16 to 24 hours, traditionally somewhere cool — the low 60s °F rather than a 75 °F kitchen. It develops acidity and strength rather than extensibility, and it is the route to the very open, chewy crumb associated with contemporary Italian pizza.
It is also the least forgiving of the three. A biga wants a strong flour and a reasonably stable temperature; get both wrong and you have a dough that tears on opening and stays tight in the oven.
How to choose, practically
- Volume that varies week to week — direct. Flexibility beats aroma when you are throwing dough away.
- Dough that fights you when you open it — poolish. It is the most direct fix for extensibility.
- You want a bigger, more open rim — biga, and a stronger flour to carry it.
- A kitchen that runs 70 °F in January and 90 °F in July — direct, with cold maturation in the walk-in. Preferments are much more sensitive to a room that swings twenty degrees.
Change one thing at a time
Switching method, flour and hydration in the same week teaches you nothing, because you cannot attribute the result. Move to a 25% poolish, keep everything else identical, and run it for two weeks. Write down the room temperature at mixing every day. That is how you end up with numbers that are yours rather than somebody else’s.