Hi
Pleased with my progress so far but would appreciate some advice on odd shape. Bread is 60% hydration and from own starter. Oven spring is ok but I am getting bursting out from base on a pizza stone. I am tipping out dough from round basket onto heated stone before baking. The edge bursting out is the bit of the dough which touches the stone first as I tip the basket away from me.
thanks Mark
Hello!
After getting a strong and consistent starter going (two feedings a day), I finally baked my bread. Overall, great outcome! Beautiful, crisp crust and delicious inside. My only wish is for the loaf to be higher. The first loaf had a center of about 4 inches, the second about 2-3 inches (see pictures.) I always see these beautiful, full, circular loaves on blogs and sites. Any suggestions on how I can get a higher risen (less dense) loaf?
Thanks!
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Hello,
As you will see, I'm not very experienced... but here's the thing. I've been working on this bread for over 24 hours (well, if rising time, etc counts) and have just finished proofing it in the banneton basket, which, as best I can tell, I have prepared correctly (rubbing lots of flour into it). Still, the time came to remove the carefully proofed bread from the basket and it's as stuck as anything. Using floured tea towels was sticky, but this is way worse - and of course it's destroyed my nicely shaped and proofed bread. Any advice for avoiding this?
Thanks!
I've taken some starter (90% AP and 10% ww) from the refrigerator, weighed it, added 1/2 as much flour and 1/4 as much water. I'm aiming for a little drier dough. It's covered and in the closed pantry.
I've done the same with einkorn starter.
Let's see what happens this time. I'm willing to keep at this until I produce a decent loaf, but must admit, discouragement is starting to rear it's ugly head.
I'm going to try the 123 method yet again, but not sure it's working too well for me. Maybe I'll modify it and autolyse the flour and water and then proceed...
I really want to perfect creating sourdough bread. Miners did it! I should be able to, also!
Well, I'm excited. I make a very popular bread that is made with a sponge / poolish based on my hubby's homemade beer. He took a loaf down to his beer & wine making supplier, and in exchange they gave me a 500 gram bag of a dark malt (powder). Now the challenge is to come up with a recipe using this yummy stuff and get a loaf back to them!
Any ideas?
I recently tried Susan of San Diego’s Ultimate Sourdough – one small loaf. I used 25g Stoates stone-ground organic rye flour (instead of the whole wheat) and 225 g. Gilchester organic unbleached white bread flour, 12 g starter and 175 g. water,5 g salt . I followed the method exactly but with an overnight proof in the frig. I’ve been making different sourdoughs for quite a while now but this was the best I’ve ever made with a superb deep flavour .
So good in fact that next I doubled the recipe and made one large one – 60 g. rye, 190 g.
Gilchester 350 g. water, 24 g. starter, 10 g. salt. This too was very good but I noticed that the dough seemed wetter than the previous one, the proofing took much longer and it didn’t rise quite as well.
The third time with the doubled recipe I deducted 25 g. water and yet it became noticeably wetter than try No. 2 during the mixing even though I added about two tablespoons of extra flour. The dough continued to be unmanageably wet throughout and not much rising took place. I won’t torture you with my exhaustive efforts along the way but finally I decided to make a ciabatta which had tremendous flavour but not too much rise.
I weigh all my ingredients including the water. I realize that the starter is a small amount so needs long proofing. My starter was 1:3:4 as recommended and made from a very active refreshed starter. The flours were from the same bags.
Although most people on the supplier’s website absolutely love the Gilchester flour I noticed that one or two people commented that it was much too wet. Can flour vary so much from day to day and batch to batch? Once opened do they absorb humidity from the air even if covered? Did I add too much rye? Was doubling the recipe a no-no?
The English Gilchester flour would not be a strong as U.S. or Canadian strong bread flour.
We so much love this combination of flavour and texture that I would dearly love to hear if anyone has any ideas as to what might be going wrong and how I can correct it.
Many thanks
Hi there,
I have been making sourdough for quite a while now and have had some spectacular results, but recently things just have not been working out and I cannot figure out why.
I'm generally using the Tartine basic country loaf recipe which has worked great before.
Starter: 200g 50:50 white:whole wheat, 100% hydration (though I have used others)
Recipe: 900g white (Fairhaven Mill, 10% protein) + 100g King Arthur Organic whole wheat, hydration: 75 - 80%, 15g salt.
I normally use a 5 - 20% inoculation of starter and use it when a teaspoon of it is just able to float in water. I generally mix the dough then leave for 30 mins before adding the salt with a little extra water. Then I stretch and fold about once every 30 - 40 mins for 2 - 4 hours, after which I divide in two. I do an initial shaping and bench rest for 30 mins then final shape and put in a proofing again for between 2 and 4 hours or longer in the fridge. I try to use the poke test on the dough to get an idea of whether it's ready or not. I bake in a cast iron pan or some improvised equivalent, but the problem seems to occur before the bake.
I feel like I have tried systematically varying a ton of stuff to no avail: using a more or less mature starter, shortening and lengthening the time taken for each stage, reducing and increasing the amount of manipulation, different starters, refrigerating, more or less shaping...
Problems range from totally collapsing, losing shape, or splitting into regions of very large holes surrounded by dense crumb.
Any thoughts would be welcome!
Last week I tried my hand at the Hamelman Semolina Levain bread with 125% bread flour liquid levain. With semolina coarse grain #1 used instead of the powdery durum, for experimentation. And it worked out, mostly just fine. But the flavor just wasn't grabbing me. Hence take 2 here has a few changes, while keeping everything else the same.
I substituted out the bread flour in the levain and used rye flour. Also went back to using the durum rimaccinata flour. For a final change from last week I dumped my raw sesame seeds and used toasted seeds instead. And I think the whole process went along just dandy. Once again the oven spring blew past a few of my score lines, but in the realm of heartaches, it sits pretty low on the disappointment scale. Still too recent out of the oven to break into. But I think that the flavor will be heartier than before with the addition of the 15% rye.
365x3 baguettes, 650x1 batard
Crumb shot of the batard added.
Ciao bambini, alan
Hi guys,
I'm having a lot of trouble building a sourdough starter and I don't know what to do anymore.
I've tried I think 15-20 times with several recipes (like Hamelman's or Chad Robertson's), with different kind of flour and water (even bottled water!), honey, fresh fruit, different temperatures...
EVERYTIME it goes the SAME way, regardless of the changes I try to apply: it starts really well and fast, usually in 20 hours it's already almost doubled. After that, when I start mixing it with new flour and water, it slowly dies. It dies with the exact same pattern no matter what I do.
I'm really frustrated right now... does anyone have any idea of what's going on? Is it possbile that there's some "bad" bacteria in the air in my house that kills it everytime? I know it sounds weird, but really I don't know what to think...
Thank you!