March 9, 2014 - 5:55pm
Organic Flour Cracking and not hold shape before baking HELP
Hi,
I am in need of serious help. I have just recently been called to bake with all organic flour at my current job. I am using Farmers Ground from Ithica NY. The dough is a wheat and rye blend, I'm not sure what is going wrong. After mixing it has full development with the window pane test however the dough is breaking apart during its final fermentation after shaping. When I was finally able to achieve some rise without cracking, it had little to no rise in the oven. It tastes great, but is way too dense. I'm not ruling out that technique can be the issue here, although it is easy to pin all my problems on my organic flour.
Also, I have barley malt extract. Is this diastatic malt? I'm using red star active dry. I am a mess, please help
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Farmers Ground is based out of Trumansburg NY!
Any pictures?
I had cracking in my loaves just before baking them a couple of years back. I did a shorter first proofing and that helped. I was also using a starter instead of active yeast so the results might not be the sa me for you.
Having changed the flour you will most likely have to adapt your process some.
The difference between regular barley malt and diastatic malt is that the latter is made from sprouted barley. Typically if it doesn't say it's diastatic it's not. If I remember correctly, regular is a sweetener and aids in crust color while diastatic is a dough conditioner.
Here is the recipe and timeline, all flour is from Farmers Ground, and the yeast is Red Star Active Dry, though I may be switching to Saf Instant Red Label soon.
For the pre-ferment, total weight 625g;
whole wheat flour 80% 301.31g
bread flour 20% 75.31g
yeast .97% 3.63%
water (67 degrees F) 65% 244.75g
That is mixed together, fermented at ambient (somewhere around 65-70F) for an hour then refrigerated overnight.
Dough
Bread flour 79.11% 1254.02g
Rye flour 20.89% 331.07g
Yeast .46% 7.34g
Salt 3.18% 50.40g
Barley Malt Extract (Syrup) 1.32% 20.92g
Honey 3.95% 62.58g
Pre-ferment 39.43% 625g
Water (about 67F) 65% 1030.31g
Sunflower Seeds (8% of dough weight) 270g
Once the preferment is at about 60F, mix with all the liquids and yeast, then add the dry and incorporate on low speed (on my hobart thats speed 1). Then mix on medium (speed 2) for 8 minutes, the window pane is at full development. Then mix in the sunflower seeds, another 2 minutes on speed 2. The dough is 77F at this point.
Fold and bulk ferment 30 minutes at ambient, and again twice more before final shaping, in the test stage I have been making 950g loaves.
When using this recipe with conventional flour, it final proofs for about 1hr - 1.5hrs at ambient before I refrigerate it to be baked the following morning. However with the organic flour, about 30 - 40 minutes in, and nowhere near the size as the conventional loaf for the same time, they begin to crack apart and deflate.
The next time I mixed, I refrigerated half the loaves after 30 minutes into the final fermentation, before it had time to crack, but there was little to no rise in the oven the following morning and the loaves were dense. The other half I baked immediately and had the same results.
The oven is a standard restaurant convection oven, my next batch I will switch to a conventional oven, preheated to 500F then dropped to 400F after steaming. My steam method is throwing water on rocks and chain as suggested by Bouchon (fantastic crust and oven spring results with this method, again, with conventional flour).
Sorry no pics at this time, but I'll post more if it happens again.
I can try 20 minutes between folds, or should I cut out additional folds completely and shape after a 30 minute bulk ferment?