The Fresh Loaf

A Community of Amateur Bakers and Artisan Bread Enthusiasts.

oven spring

krekdayam's picture

challah that looks like a soccer ball

December 23, 2008 - 5:53am -- krekdayam
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I am preparing to give challah as Holiday house gifts in Spain, the three attemps have lacked the bulbous protuberances that I remember from Clevelands finest jewish bakeries.

What can I do to make the big bumps come out? They are theere when the bread is braided, they disappear upon baking with the oven spring

sharsilber's picture

Why does my loaf "blow up"?

October 8, 2008 - 7:59pm -- sharsilber

Made these crown challahs today that have an apple butter filling.  Taste wonderful, but look like they exploded.  Any suggestions on what is causing this?  Too much oven rise?  How do I avoid that?  It is a woven loaf not a pull apart bread which it looks like.

Challah

The one on the left is what it should look like.  I made all of these and do not know why some look good and others look like they exploded.

Wild-Yeast's picture

Explosive Oven Spring

June 10, 2008 - 12:24am -- Wild-Yeast

Performed the bi-daily bake tonight and was totally suprised with the amount of oven spring. The loaf nearly blew itself apart! You can barely see the slash pattern..., I've decreased the time of the bake to around 36 minutes with the first 15 minutes under the stainless steel cloche. Find out tomorrow what the crumb looks like.

Wild-Yeast

 

San Francisco Sourdough French

danmerk's picture

Glezer's Book or is it me--oven spring?

June 16, 2007 - 10:21pm -- danmerk

I am sitting here at 1:01am EST on a Saturday night tasting a piece of bread I just baked. The flavor is nice, but the bread is another dissapointment. The bread I made was the Kalmata Olive loaf in Glezer's book. However I replaced olives with sun dried tomatoes because I was out of olives. But that is not my problem-- I think my overall problem is oven spring. ALL my breads are flat.

mountaindog's picture
mountaindog

I've been real busy the past few weeks so have not been online much, but did make time to bake each weekend.

Back in Feb., I was lamenting that my Thom Leonard boules, which I had been making successfully for weeks, were suddenly getting overproofed and collapsing when hitting the hot stone (thread here). I was wondering if it was my switch to 100% organic King Arthur Artisan flour, or if my starter is getting too strong and acidic. I took the advice people here gave me about folding the dough more and paying attention to shaping better. So I did a test to see if the flour played a role or not, but also incorporated the advice given on folding, and I was careful to ferment them at about 70-75F rather then 80-85F as done earlier. To see if my flour switch played a role, I bought some regular King Arthur AP flour and made two batches of the Leonard loaf side by side, one batch with KA organic artisan flour and the other with the KA AP. I folded each batch 4 times, 30 minutes apart during the first bulk fermentation. I also carefully shaped each loaf into a tight boule, rested for 10 min., then placed in the bannetons, and I could not believe how high the loaves rose during the final proof, after only 3 hours:

I was in for even more surprise when I baked them - the oven spring was HUGE. Here are the loaves made with the King Arthur 100% organic artisan flour on the left (oval shape), and to the right are the ones made with the King Arthur AP flour (round shape). No discernable difference in the quality of the rise, oven spring, or crumb structure, they all came out excellent, and all because I paid a lot more attention to proper folding and shaping, and note that these were wet doughs:

I also retarded 2 of the loaves in the frig for about 6 hours before baking right out of the cold frig and into the hot oven, and got equally huge oven spring as for the ones I did not retard.

Here is the crumb shot of yet another batch a week later done by the same folding/shaping method, but using King Arthur organic whole wheat flour for 30% of the flour in the recipe (I have not been able to get that yin/yang symbol again in my bread that JMonkey likes though, ha!):

Conclusion of the experiment: My earlier overproofing problems were not due to the KA organic flour. It performed equally as well as the KA AP flour. The extra folding of the wet dough, and tighter shaping of the boules seemed to make all the difference, plus probably cooling the fermenting temps down to 70-75F I think helped. Thanks especially to gt and Bill Wraith for pointing out my lack of folding as being the main culprit. I've been having consistently great outcome with this recipe ever since.

I also made some sourdough spelt blueberry flaxseed muffins. These rose nice and high, but needed a little more sweetening and perhaps a bit more salt than my usual recipe calls for, probably because of the extra liquid and flour brought in by the sourdogh levain, otherwise they were quite nice. Somehwhat dense due to 100% spelt flour, including in the levain. The regular recipe for my muffins is here, but I modified it by expanding my regular batter white SD starter with 1 c. spelt flour and 1 c water (similar to how the King Arthur baking book makes a levain for sourdough waffles), which replaces the same amount of flour and liquid (oil) in the original recipe. Then followed the orginal recipe using baking soda rather then powder to get even more rise. Next time I will add a bit more oil, brown sugar, and salt:

staff of life's picture

Oven spring, where are you?

March 7, 2007 - 5:35pm -- staff of life
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I think I may be having a problem with my oven.  I turn these beautifully shaped boules out of their bannetons, slash them (and manage most times not to deflate them) and in the oven, they brown, but there's not a lot of spring.  I have the problem also with my other breads, but it's more noticeable in the boules.  My oven does have an air circulation problem--even though I use baking stones, if I try to make a standard sandwich loaf of bread, it will rise up very high on one side of the bread, and normally on the other.  I never had that problem before I had this oven.  So I don&

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