I've recently bought Tartine Bread book, and am trying the basic sourdough loaf

The stretch and fold seems to go fine, though I have needed to use a bit of flour for the pre-shaping / rough shaping, and for the final shaping.  The final shaping seems fine - quite a nice ball!  I've then proofed this in a linen-lined basket and it rises OK (if not that much).  The proof time feels short to me - I've poked it to the stage when it doesn't spring back fully...

The problem is when I turn it out - it loses all its height and makes a bid to ooze off the peel!  I've almost no time to score it, it's such a rush to get it onto the baking stone before it completely flattens (last night it tried to ooze off the stone!)...

The bread rises beautifully in the oven, the crumb is nice (if a bit over-proofed perhaps, with a bit of a flying top), it doesn't break through the scores much, but does rise upwards - however, it is still quite a low profile

I tried reducing hydration a bit last time - and if anything, it oozed more!  I'm using quite a high gluten flour (Waitrose Canadian Spring)

Any suggestions please?

Yesterday evening, I messed up a recipe for a small fruit+nuts sourdough loaf and ended up with an incoherend wet mess of dough that wouldn't be stretched or folded, or even handled without falling to pieces.
I was on the verge of throwing it out, but decided to see what happened, if only for the learning experience. So after two hours of fermentation I manhandled it into a sausage shape and put it in a pan for overnight proof in my cold cupboard. Amazingly, it had doubled in size this morning, so I baked it anyway.

It's not pretty, but it turned into a nice little loaf with an airy crumb, and the taste is great!
(Pics of dough and crumb in my Picasa bread album, click on "brood" below)

From Brood

Over the weekend I decided to crack open my new copy of Peter Reinhart's "The Bread Baker's Apprentice" and branch out from my year-long self imposed focus on perfecting a few selected artisan bread recipes. I really wanted to try a few high hydration recipes to get more comfortable with them. Rich Man's Brioche looked and sounded pretty exotic, so off I went to buy the truckload of butter called for in the recipe.

I decided to switch from the DLX mixer to the ancient Hobart mixer & its paddle to tackle this dough. I was glad I did . . . man, that dough is wet! I double checked the quantities to make sure that it really called to that much butter and yeast. I wasn't sure it would actually come together. After mixing a few minutes longer than Reinhart suggested, I scraped/poured the dough onto a pan and placed it in the fridge for an overnight chilling.

The dough had doubled in volume overnight and seemed fairly firm. Attempting to form this dough into something that resembled a loaf was a bit of a challenge. It still felt so soft, kind of like room temperature butter. I tried to work quickly; I was afraid the heat from my hands would melt this dough. Anyway, I formed three dough loaves and left them out to rise in an 80 degree kitchen, warmed by the 100+ temperature of summertime in Phoenix.

Despite what I considered a fairly high temperature for the final rise, it took about 3 1/2 hours for those loaves to double. They baked for about 40 minutes and despite my lousy shaping technique did not look to bad (sorry no pictures!). Crum was fairly open. The loaves were very light and soft. Lots of oil in the loaf pan after removal of the bread. The taste as well as the look of the crust, was a lot like a giant croissant. Like some other posts I have read here, I will probably opt for the alternate recipe in BBA that uses about half the butter on my next attempt.

A couple of questions for those of you who are more familiar with this type of bread -

         Is 3 1/2 hours abnormal for a final rise with Brioche? Is that because of the high butter content?

         Any tips on how to shape dough that is so soft? (It really was like working with cold, soft clay rather than bread dough)

         Anyone ever accomplish Brioche completely by hand? Would Hammelman's "no-knead" technique work?

Phxdog.

I use baker's math to determne the hydration level of dough when the dough primarily consists of water and flour.  But what about recipes that contain other wetting agents such as eggs, butter, oil, honey etc.  Is there an accurate way to determine hydration levels when items such as these are included in a recipe?

I was visiting pizzamaking.com this morning and there's a thread on Pizzarium, the chi-chi Roman pizza restaurant that features a foccacia-like pan pizza. Someone posted a link to a youtube video of chef Gabriele Bonci showing some of his dough handling techniques. At about 2:10 into the video, he shows how he kneads his very wet dough.

Hi all,

I have been using my bread machine for several years, very good results so far. Then I had the idea to buy a kichen scale and start using it for the recipes, my wife was against, I convinced her by saying that we would have even greater reliability when using the scale. I tried a simple french bread, less ingredients would be better, I thought. Here is the french bread recipe that is in my bread machine book ( I have used it with success for several times ):

Water-1 1/2 cups Sugar- 2 TBL Salt 2 tsp Flour 4 cups Yeast 2 1/4 tsp

Converting water from volume to weight is easy: 355 grams, for the flour, I went to my king arthur package that says: 1 serving is 1/4 cup or 30 grams, so 4 cups would be 4*30*4 or 480 grams.

The bread was obviously too wet and collapsed. What could be wrong ? My wife wants to step back from the scale now. After the fact I calculate the hydration rate: 355/480 = 74% which much higher than the 66% the "the fresh loaf hadbook" tells.

OK, would my bread machine's recipe book be considering people would pack the flour when measuring by volume ? Any other conjecture ?

Another related question about hydration: Other liquids like oil, molasses, honey, should I add their weight when calculating the hydration rate ?

Thanks all for getting this far on my post, I need to save my marriage ;)

I recently ate some SPECTACULAR pizza bianca (in Sweden of all places) which I hadn't had since the last time I was in Rome. It got me inspired to recreate some of my own.

At the time, the chef in question, quite openly admitted that beautifully 'crisp outside / chewy inside' crumb was resultant from the 90% hydration. I gasped, wondering how I might mange a dough that sticky by hand.

So my questions are a) does anyone have a reliable formula specifically for this dough? And b) has anyone had any experience of working with the dough by hand?

All help gratefully received. Blessings to you all.