November 29, 2018 - 12:44pm
Bread swells underneath in the oven
Hi. I’ve been baking a range of sourdough and long fermentation breads for a while now, usually with really good results. Sometimes though I find when a loaf bakes instead of rising primarily on top giving a roughly hemisphere shape, it expands underneath as well leaving something that looks more like a rugby ball. On these occasions it also tends to have particularly large holes inside it. Can anyone tell me what causes this please? I prove in a banneton and bake directly on a stone with steam added to the oven. Thanks!
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You do not give any details, but when these things happen to me (rugby ball, expansion downward as well as upward, large holes) my first guess is that I did not let the dough ferment long enough. If you live anywhere that is experiencing the onset of winter and colder temperatures (and cooler kitchen temperatures), then you likely will have to increase the amount of time that you allow for the bulk fermentation stage of your bread production.
This fits in the category of "Watch the dough, not the clock." One of Jeffrey Hamelman's breads never behaved for me until I decided to ignore his time frames in the winter (my kitchen is not 76 or 78 degrees the way things are at King Arthur) and let the dough sit in my Cambro tub until I could see all of the signals of proper fermentation. Then my loaves stopped looking like a rugby ball, rose upward instead of all around, and had holes that were what I was hoping for (rather than caves).
Happy baking.