March 16, 2016 - 12:54pm
Tartine-style loaves, success but looking for more sour
These are two Tartine-style country loaves.
Used the same formula as I have before, found here http://www.theperfectloaf.com/best-sourdough-recipe/
Only thing I changed was using the entire levain instead of saving some for the starter. I'm pleased with my results, but I want to get a more sour flavor – which I realize isn't the point of this kind of recipe! I'll be looking into a more stiff levain in the future
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Gorgeous loaves - the giant blisters are great!
has an ear after my own heart that speaks to me! I am an ear man! Beautiful.
bread are
Using whole grain flour especially the bran, higher temperatures for ferment and proof 88 - 92 F, retarding the starter, levain and dough and higher hydration or some combination of them.
Happy baking
Thanks for the input, A BakEr and dabrownman.
Currently the recipe I'm using has me using 150g liquid levain for 875g of total flour. Would you measure that 17% levain? Or 8.5% prefermented flour?
Right now, I have a 66% hydration starter in the fridge (has WW, bread and some rye). I'm planning on using that to build my levains for the time being.
I have David Snyder's SFSD#4 about 3 hours into bulk fermentation right now. I'm keeping the container in the oven with a pan of hot water to help with the temperature. I was amazed at how sticky the stiff levain I made for this loaf was. After letting it sit for around 16 hours, the levain was pretty difficult to get out of the container. I hope everything is ok in there..
I'll post again tomorrow when I've baked the boule!
levain and 90+875 = 965 total flour = 90.965 = 9.36% prefermented flour. If you included the levain flour in hte 875 then 90/875 = 10.28% prefermented flour.
When retarding the starter, do you have to worry about it being less active or anything like that? I'm looking at this recipe for instance https://www.weekendbakery.com/posts/san-francisco-style-sourdough-bread/
They retard the levain for 34 hours! I'm worried that it'll lose some punch..
retarded. I retard my stiff rye starter for 24 weeks but each week i take 5-10 g of it to build a 3 stage (4 hours each) levain in the 10% pref-fermented flour range. I want my starter at the its peak when it goes to work in the dough. I want to know it is right rather than hope it is. I usually retard by built levain once it has doubled after the 3rd feeding for 24 hours to build the sour. But I take it out of the fridge and stir it down and let it rise at least another 25 - 50% over the next 2 hours as the dough flour and water autolsye to make sure it is still ready to go.
Ah! Good to know about the last stir-down phase while the autolyse happens. I'll definitely try that out
No Muss No Fuss Starter
A retarded starter will be less active than a warm fresh one, but the usual fix is simply to use a very high portion of starter in your dough, which it appears that recipe does.
I worked in a bakery where we would retard the starter for our San Francisco style sourdough -- preferably for 48 hours -- to really bring out the sourness in the bread. And, of course, we used a very high percentage of the starter in the dough.
I also do this at home as one way to make very sour bread. I usually use around 25% prefermented flour.
A warning though -- if your starter becomes proteolytic, you're gonna have problems. Adding a high portion of proteolytic starter to your dough is a surefire way to create weak and shred-prone dough.
Here's what I do to prevent that . . .
I use an "old dough" method. I create a starter at the same hydration I plan my final dough to be. This will be an actual dough -- it has the usual 2% salt added. I'll let it proof for 8-12 hours at room temp, then toss it into the fridge for 12-36 hours. Since this starter is basically a clone of my final dough, the percentage of prefermented flour is equal to the percentage of dough the starter will make up. So I just say that 25% of my final dough weight will consist of the old dough.
The salt and stiffer dough-consistency combine to create a starter that can hold out for a good day or two in the fridge before it disintegrates into a proteolytic mess. If the starter still has a doughy consistency and holds together when you use it your golden. If the texture is more like cottage cheese and it falls apart then you've let it go too long and you might need to figure out a backup plan.
Cheers!
Trevor
proteolytic are largely unfounded and pretty much urban baker's myth. I have never had a starter or dough break down due to protease enzymes that breaking the protein chains in gluten causing the dough to turn into goo. I have over proofed and over fermented plenty a dough though. First off, there is very little protease, especially in white flour, to begin with and in normal bread making practices little protease activity happens - just enough to get the dough workable. These is more protease in whole grains but even then the activity is quite minor at normal room and bread making temperatures.
Protease is an enzyme - not a living thing. It doesn't reproduce and become many more than what it was when it started out in the flour. What ever protease was in the flour when it went into the starter, levain or bread is what is in there in the end of final proofing. Temperature does make a difference in how fast the protease works to weaken the protein chains. At 36 F The protease activity is reduced by a factor of 4 from room temperature. So the small amount of protease actiivity at 72 F room temperature, is reduced to almost nothing at fridge temperatures. So keeping a starter, levain and dough in the fridge for 48 hours is not going to cause any harm to your gluten at all.
Since LAB and yeast are living things and do reproduce making many more of them in the bread making process, retarding the starter, levain and dough can have some effect on how sour and acidic the bread becomes. But even this is relative and minimal for a 24 hour retard of any of them. At 36 F LAB and yeast are reproducing very slowly; 20 times less for LAB and 60 times less for yeast, than at 72 F. But this difference between the two rates can be taken advantage of to make more sour.
As Debra Wink pointed out to me when I bounced the idea off of her for a long retarded rye starter to make more sour, her response was right on. It wasn't so much the temperature that would provide more sour but the really, really long retard time - up to 24 weeks in this case, that would eventually increase the LAB to yeast ratio enough to make a sour difference in the levain dough and bread.
The thing is that retarding the levain and dough for 1 - 2 days each can bring out a bit more sour but the main reason we do these things is to fit in our personal schedules to the baking schedule. We are just trying to slow thing down so we can get a bit of sleep. To really get the sour, you need to provide a buffering agent, bran, to allow the LAB to reproduce longer than they normally can and provide a temperature, 36 F, that promotes LAB reproduction rates over yeast, 3 to 1, for a very long, long time since the reproductive rates are so low at that temperature. You also have to ensure the wee beasties don't run out of food over that very long time. Otherwise, you are much better off doing ferment and proofing at 90 F to get much more sour than you will by retarding the levain and dough for a couple of days each.
There really isn't such a thing as a proteolytic starter in the real baking world, or having one that could effect your levain or dough horribly - certainly not one kept in the fridge, even for weeks at a time. The dough will over ferment and over proof long before any protease problems happen at room temperature or in the fridge. But, if you raise the temperature to 135 F where the yeast are killed off so the dough can't ferment and proof and the protease is working 3.5 times faster than at room temperature and it is a WW dough, then the dough will eventually turn to goo given enough time - but there still won't be any more protease in the mix at the end than what it started out with or be any more proteolytic.
Everything is relative in bread making. In the real world, we can't get a mass of dough instantly to 90 F much less 36 F from room temperature So we are always dealing with getting some kind of compromise. The dough will over ferment and over proof before protease ever knows it every time. Those wee beasties are the ones really in control:-)
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/enzymes-the-little-molecules-that-bake-bread/
Happy SD baking
I can assure you that in the real world starters and dough can and do become proteolytic. I've seen it on a small scale in my own kitchen, and I've seen it on a large scale in commercial bakeries. It's not a pretty sight when two hundred pounds of dough practically melts right before your eyes.
Yes, it's a very different scenario than simply overproofing a dough. Overproofing is not a prerequisite to gluten disintegration. I've seen it happen on doughs that were quite far from overproofing.
You threw out a lot of science and numbers up there, but they do not discount my personal experience. I understand that you can keep your rye starter refrigerated for months at a time and then build it up into healthy levain. I'm not disputing that. I like your method.
But your rye starter has little gluten to begin with. If you keep a wheat starter in your fridge for 24 weeks you will see the gluten degrade (though you can still build a healthy levain from it, as well). Or just keep it on the counter for 24 hours or so at room temp. A nice doughy wheat starter will become slimy liquid when it sits out too long. That is proteolysis. Now use that slime to make up a quarter of your dough and see what you get.
Perhaps we're speaking two different languages here. When I say proteolytic, I mean simply the breakdown of the protein. Whether that's done by protease or because of long exposure to acid is irrelevant to me. Call it gluten degradation if you prefer.
But it's a real problem that does happen.
Cheers!
Trevor
With your adapted pate fermentee technique, after retarding for 12-36 hours, what's the rest of the process like? After mixing in the other 75% of the dough, whats the bulk fermentation and final proofing like?
It's simply another way of manipulating your starter to achieve a desired characteristic, so you can incorporate this method in many different processes. Bulk fermentation will depend on whether you mix your dough warm or cold (the large portion of chilled starter will drop the temperature of your dough significantly if you take it straight from the fridge like I do), the ambient temp, dough quality, flour strength, activity of your starter, etc. So you have plenty of room to play around.
That said . . .
My usual process for old dough SF Style sourdough consists of using all bread flour for the starter and dough (the extra protein helps it hold up to the acid and helps makes up for the large portion of partially degraded flour from the starter), and I usually make this a stiffer dough (62-65%) also for added strength (and to slow the proof time for more flavor development). But feel free to use whatever hydration you prefer.
I usually mix it cold and let it warm up to room temp (or in my Brod & Taylor), also just to prolong the proof time a bit. You can use whatever mixing method you prefer. I like to do it by hand in the mixing bowl. I don't autolyse the dough since so much of the dough is preferemented anyway.
I can usually get around 4-5 hours of bulk fermentation, but with that much starter it can go pretty quick if you make a softer dough or mix/proof it warmer. Final proof is usually around half that.
Again, this is just one way that I like to make this particular bread. I use that same old dough method with other breads and methods as well, though the bulk of my breads use fresh starter. Experiment and find out what you like and what works for you.
Good luck!
Trevor