Martha the Newbie
This forum has been coming up in my searches for a couple of months now, so I decided to join in. Thanks for all your shared help.
I'm teaching online at a technical college in Brooklyn this summer and baking bread a couple of times a week -- three if I can find someone to eat it. We are still pretty much isolated here after the shocks of March-to-May. (Best wishes and best possible luck to everyone along those lines.) Sourdough breadmaking (along with bread-reading) has been really good at taking me out of myself. Excellent escapist recreation, and I get to eat bread.
I think my third or fourth loaf back in April was really tasty and had a pretty good crumb, but replicating that success has been tough! I'm trying to get consistent. I have a nice-looking loaf cooling in the kitchen right now and am hoping that when I cut into it in a couple of hours I will have a repeat of a recent success. *That* was a completely unanticipated bolt from the blue.
For a long time, everything would appear to be going well, but the finished loaf would be gummy and just not delicious. So I got really serious about understanding what was going on with both phases of fermentation and am making progress now.
The unexpected success came at the end of a day in which I seemed to have done everything either randomly, illogically, experimentally, or just wrong as a result of distraction and inattention. The dough tried to fall completely apart during shaping, but I managed to get it into its proofing container and into the refrigerator. It rose. I cooked it. And the crumb was exactly what I had been looking for and never achieved. No dense spots. The small holes were bigger and the big holes were smaller and slicing it was like cutting through air. A joy to eat.
Now waiting to cut open today's attempt at a repeat performance and praying I don't have to teeter on the edge of complete collapse to get another good loaf.
Images are the crumb I liked so much and today's not-yet-seen attempt at a repeat performance.
Best, Martha
The bread looks good. I'm also in the area and it's very hot and humid as you know. I have not baked bread for about 3 weeks or so but I've been making pizza in the outside oven lately.
What is your recipe and process to deal with the high heat?
Hi, G.
I try to do most work with the dough or actual baking very early in the morning. I have an exhaust fan running in the kitchen. I also do what I can to keep my ingredients cool, refrigerating my flours and water. After the initial mix I will sometimes refrigerate the dough for an hour or so, and then use a little igloo cooler to try to keep the temperature of the dough down around 65 or so for at least some of the bulk ferment. I usually just move canned drinks from the fridge in and out, or use an ice pack. I'm still figuring all this out. If the dough gets too cold fermentation doesn't do much at all, and I am trying to avoid extreme shifts in temperature. I'm kind of making all this up as I go. It seems to me that once fermentation reaches a certain point (40% increase or so) it can accelerate and get out of hand in the heat.
Oh, I will also, if it's quite hot, skip the pre-heating of the oven and start the baking in a cold dutch oven. The crust turns out a bit softer, which makes it easier to cut. I don't mind the tradeoff sometimes.
The proportions I've been using are for a small loaf: 260g ap (or half ap and half bread flour), 40g whole wheat, 225g water, 7g salt, 54g starter (mostly rye). One thing I did differently for these was to substitute 60g of spent (unfed) whole wheat starter for 30g flour and 30g water, in hopes of getting more tang. The flavor of the bread is nice, but not appreciably tangy, so I probably won't try that again. But I did notice that teetering right on the brink of a too-long bulk ferment produced the nicest crumb ever. I'm trying to figure out now how to stop a little short of the brink and still get that outcome.
I do the usual autolyse, stretch & fold for a couple hours, bulk, bake, and proof overnight in the fridge routine for most of my bread, but today I'm doing a no-knead, with most of the bulk fermenting happening in that little cooler. I'll bake it tomorrow morning. I always, always use a clear tub with measurements marked on the side now so that I can tell exactly where it is with the rising. That has helped a great deal.
The predicted heat for this week may stop me from doing any of this, which is fine, because I have bread in the freezer.
I haven't tried that yet.
Martha,
Your post made me laugh. My children say the best things happen when I just get a wild hair and throw things together...or everything goes wrong but somehow it all turns out such a great loaf. And I stand back scratching my head and wondering how that happened. Now the trick is to repeat that intentionally. I hope you had better luck at it than I've had!
That's a very nice looking loaf. Sourdough is so fun, isn't it?
Jen