A forum for bread baking challenges.
One of my longstanding challenges with bread machine bread is the formation of very large bubbles just underneath the crust as the dough goes through long rise cycles. It happens by far the most on my sourdough bread, which is leavened with wild yeast only. The bread machine imposes many limitations, including the fact that it goes through all of the bread making steps in one continuous pass.
I just recently switched from King Arthur AP flour to Maine Grains 86% extracting AP flour. The Maine Grains flour is milled to order, and therefor very fresh. I knew it would be more reactive than the KA flour, but oh boy, it moved fast. My sourdoughs were massively over proofed, despite cutting the bulk fermentation time by about an hour. They were unrecognizable after spending the night in the fridge. My baguettes were in the oven for the exact same time as normal and came out as embers.
Hi folks,
I received some help here a while ago re my struggles with getting a loaf to rise in a loaf pan. I mostly solved that problem by upping the hydration on my dough.
I enjoy making Beth Hensperger's White Mountain bread from her book, "The Bread Bible." But I would like to use my Dutch oven or Challenger vessel instead of a standard loaf pan.
The book recipe for a loaf pan is 375 degrees. Should I stick to that temp with another vessel? I typically use the others at a higher temp. Thank you.
What am I doing wrong, I measure everything properly, with my kitchen scale, and my dough comes out sticky. Very frustrating
Background. I started making Kaiser buns in my Ankarsrum mixer. I followed the recipe I had and they turned out great. I just purchased a commercial spiral mixer and i'm hitting my head against the wall in frustration.
I do a 50% whole grain sourdough loaf in a medium-sized bread pan (full recipe below), bulk fermenting around 5hr, shaping and then rising overnight in the fridge.
When I bake this sucker up in the morning, it really struggles to rise. A lot of times I'll barely get any sort of rise of any kind and just end up with a stupid old brick.
Here's the problem I'm having. My dough is always turning out dense when baked and never looks anything like the recipe, either during the dough stage or after baking.
I am fairly new to baking, but I've already looked at dozens and dozens of articles and I'm not really seeing anything helpful for this problem (or rather I'm seeing tons of things that are possible to do wrong, but as far as I can tell, I'm not doing any of them wrong).
