Tonight I baked a double batch of sd potato bread using recipe posted by prairie19. I underproofed by a bit as the cuts didn't even show when dough was done. The bread was heavy with a fairly open crumb. The taste is unique,tasting a bit sour and a nice taste of the ww flour. Actually the bread tastes great , My question is what should this bread   feel like ie. heavy? I did a serch but saw little to answer this. I made a double batch and made 4 one pound loafs

Hello, my fellow bread bakers,

I have a question. Why is my sourdough bread always so DENSE? From what I can tell, my sourdough starter is highly active, because I feed it 2 to 3 times a day and it bubbles right up each time. I also measure my ingredients by weight in order to make sure the percentages are accurate. No matter what I do, the bread always turns out DENSE and HEAVY. The flavour is always subtle and complex, but the texture is just too thick and chewy.

I know this has something to do with the strength of my sourdough culture, because when I spike my recipe with COMMERCIAL YEAST, the bread turns out light and airy with a nice open crumb. But I don't like using commercial yeast to supplement the fermentation because it makes the bread taste more "commercial."

I need more RISING POWER from my sourdough culture. How can I improve my yeast's rising power?

Best,

Craig

SO. Today was the first time I've ever baked bread period AND used whole wheat flour so I'm still attempting to figure out the whole baking thing. (I'm mostly a cook, not so much a baker so these absolute proportions are something I'm still wrapping my head around HAHA).

Anyways, I pretty much ended up with what typical failures in WW baking look like....dry, dense-as-bricks bread.

I only used Whole Wheat Flour and Dark Rye Flour so to subsitute the lack of gluten? I added a bit of Vital Wheat Gluten.

Anyways, here's a rough of what I did:

SPONGE: 1c. dark rye flour, 2 c. WW Flour, 3 packets active dry yeast, 2 c. H2O, 2 tsp Honey,
The sponge was liquidy and rose for an hour and rose considerably.

DOUGH: I mixed the sponge and folded in about 1 c. WW, 1/2 c. Rye and 1.5 tbsp Vital Wheat Gluten (Along with some hemp,poppy, and flax seed)
I let it rise for 3 to 4 hours with a damp cloth in a sunny area. I may at this point have added too much flour. The dough did not rise too much but it did not rise that much (not like sponge) and it formed a little hard crust outside....

I ignored that, shaped and sliced the dough, basted it with a bit of egg, and sprinkled the top with seeds and flour.
Baked one at 400F for 10 minutes lowered the temp to 350 and baked for 30.
Second one baked for 30 - 40 min at 350.

What can I do to make a better crusty bread? (It was also incredibly bland-- I think I need to add some salt for that)

Do I HAVE to add unbleached flour to bread to make it a little fluffier but still maintain that nice rustic crust? It's a bit discouraging when I would love a high-fiber, 100% whole wheat bread that's crusty and similar to the artisan bread that I buy that my supermarket bakes the day of (from La Brea Brand and such).

---

I think my problems may be that I
1. Added too much flour
2. not enough honey for yeast
3. need more gluten!
4. kneaded too much although I barely kneaded it.....?

I have some bread recipes that I am trying to "fix".  Whole wheat, multigrain and white sandwich loaf recipes specifically.  They currently yield very airy, light loaves.  This may please some but I am interested in chewy, relatively dense loaves with buttery crusts.  The current recipies produce crusts that are light and tear easily.. I am looking for more "chew" than "tear".  Any suggestions?  Do I need to type the recipe or does something jump to mind that I need to adjust, ie more sugar, more oil, more proofing time?

Many thanks!

Hi,

I've been successfully making Leader's Country Hearth bread to the delight of my family for a few months now.  I make this using his straight dough instructions, with the poolish OR by replacing poolish with refreshed starter.  All with very similar results.

Of late, my bread, particularly that made with ww flour, has been very dense and not rising well.  I do not seem to get much oven spring.  I generally bake in loaf pans, just to make things easier for lunchboxes for the little ones.  When I slice the loaf, it seems very dense around the edge of slice with a more "normal" airiness in the center of the slice, only.  Also, the loaf is not rising as high as it used to.  My dough is proofing in similar times as before, fyi.

Any tips on what could be making this difference all of a sudden?  Could increased hydration be making a difference?  (I recently noticed that Leader uses fl. oz. for water and that I had been under-measuring in normal oz.)  Type or age of flour?  

Help!  My daily bread is failing!

Thanks,

MommaT

This is from before I actually joined this site - actually this is the reason I joined this site.

Background:

In the States, I baked yeast bread. I had one recipe - from a craft, not a cookbook, so it used terms I was familiar with rather than the terms I more often find in baking recipes now that I'm looking around. It was a honey-whole wheat bread. I found all the ingredients in my local grocery store, used that recipe with no alterations except substituting applesauce for half the butter, and I baked it every Saturday, never with a problem.

Now, I live in rural China. I didn't bring the recipe with me. I don't have access to whole wheat. When I look at recipes, they confuse me. And yet my husband really misses bread. I am at a high altitude, but right now it's not dry at all, rather, close to 95% humidity most days. And, without air conditioning, heating, or well-sealed/insulated windows and walls, what it's like outside is a whole lot what it's like inside.

I found this recipe (I can't now for the life of me seem to find it anywhere!! I have it on a notecard) last week and tried it.

Oat-Nut Bread

830 ml flour
830 ml oats, ground to a flou
180 ml finely chopped walnuts
180 ml raisins
60 ml brown sugar
14 ml yeast (1/2 oz.; 14 grams)
10 ml salt
460 ml water
160 ml yogurt (I used vanilla unintentionally)
60 ml oil

1. Combine half the flour, all the oats, nuts, fruit, brown sugar, yeast, and salt.
2. In a saucepan heat water, yogurt, and oil over low heat, just until warm.
3. Add wet to dry ingredients, beating until smooth.
4. Add enough remaining flour for a soft dough.
5. Knead about 4 minutes, or until soft and elastic. Form to a ball.
6. Place on greased baking sheet, cover and let rest for 20 minutes or refrigerate overnight to bake in the morning (I did it overnight.)
7. Bake at 200C for 25-30 minutes or until golden brown.
8. Cool on a wire rack.

Unfortunently, this didn't work out for me so well. I did step 1, step 2, step 3. In step 4, I kep adding flour until I'd added way, way more than the recipe called for, and it still was a dough I could barely handle, it was so wet and sticky. I ran out of flour, and began adding oats, hoping to save it - I ground most of them but out of desperation began throwing them in there as whole rolled oats until I could finally knead the bread. Even then, it stuck to my hands, the cutting board, etc. In step 5, I formed it to more of a blob than a ball, since it was runny, and stuck it in a covered bowl in the fridge. In the morning, it was conformed to the shape of the bowl, so I dumped it on a baking sheet, stuck it in the oven, and let it bake.

The result was a very dense bread, tasty enough to eat mostly because of the raisins, but so dense I had to eat the whole thing (my husband didn't like it at all).

I tried the other loaf (this was supposed to make two) leaving it out all night after having frozen the dough (based on something I'd read online, somewhere). It came out just as dense, though it rose a bit in the oven whereas the first never did.

I'm munching on the second loaf now, hoping to get rid of it so I can bake something decent.

The only other note is that I won't be doing the walnuts again, even if I do come back to this recipe, because I couldn't taste nor feel them, and they cost the equivalent of $1.50 for so little!!

Any ideas, anyone, on what I can do better?