Hello from SEA, and... helpp... :’(
Hi,
I've started venturing in bread baking for about half a year now and ended up lurking in the background here for quite a while, as most of the time when I google any question related to bread, I'd ended up finding the answer (and some more) here.
Today I have an issue with my latest experimental dough. The summary is, it doesn't seem to develop structure at all. I 'kind of' have made this bread before with success (same base ingredients but the method varied). This could be long so please bear with me (and my English skill).
It was 'supposed to be' 80% hydration dough (explanation will follow) using 80:20 White flour:whole wheat.
I used 50% of flour (20% whole wheat+30% flour) to make poolish at 100% hydration and fermented it for about 9-10 hours at room temperature (which would be 32C+/- around here) the rest was autolysed for 45-60 min before combining with poolish and a mixture of oil/salt/balsamic vinegar at 4/2/1% of flour. Poolish had not passed its peak yet at the time, with visible tiny holes of burst air bubbles throughout the surface. The autolysed dough forms a damp ball as it should for a 60% hydration dough. Salt and vinegar was getting clump together at the bottom of mixing cup under the oil.
Here was where things started to get messy:
- I feared salt would not mix well through out the dough, so I added a little water in to dissolve it first; but since I made a very small experimenting portion, this could bump up the hydration ratio up by a few or up to 5%. I didn't think this would be a problem at the time; but since the dough turned out not as expected, so I'm 50/50 right now...
- Someone pointed out to me that salt+vinegar create hydrochloric acid which could ruin the dough. Google result points it would be negligible on its own, let alone at this very low percentage of the dough; plus I've learned from here and my past experience that adding vinegar (though probably not pre-mixed with salt) is something people do, so I don't think this would be the issue, but I don't really know chemistry anyway, so, another 50/50...
- I used sort-of pincer method to mix the dough with poolish, but ended up having to pinch the dough so many times it was kinda shredded at the end and still did not thoroughly mixed with poolish. I let it rest for about 15 minutes and proceeded to stretch and fold in hope of mixing it more along with developing the structure. after a few rounds of S&F at 15-20 min interval, the dough didn't seem to develop any structure as it would in my past experience, so I kind of panic and did S&F every 15 min or so and did it for more in each round than usual (from 4-8 S&F every half hour, I did 8-12 every 15 min).
- About 2-2.5 hours later where S&F normally ended and I would have had a decent structured dough, I gave up, wrapped it in plastic, and let it bulk ferment overnight in fridge. About 6 hours later when I woke up, the dough seemed to firm up a bit, but it could be because of its temperature because it still tore when stretched.
- At this point, it's still being fermented in my fridge as I do not have time to bake it now and have planned to do a long fermentation with this one anyway. I thought of mixing up a small portion of dough and mix them together to salvage it at one point; but on a second thought I started to think I should go through with it and see the result and probably learn something.
Could anyone troubleshoot where I made mistake? Did I shredded all the gluten when I combined the dough with poolish? Should I try adding more dough to salvage it or just go through to see the result here?
My thanks to everyone who have just read all my long whinny thread up to here. I hope it wasn't confusing. I suppose I'll learn a lot from this experiment. :D
Hey, WS. Lots going on here. I've never worked with a recipe that adds vinegar of any kinds in the dough. so I'm not sure i'll be too helpful, but i'll just give some of my observations.
- i do question the addition of vinegar to the dough. acid will break down gluten, even at 1%, i think will have strong effect. is this for flavor? ascorbic acid (vitamin C) has the effect or dough conditioner to make better rise, but it is added at a much much lower quantity.
- oil should be counted in the hydration. it also works against gluten formation and it has an effect of slowing fermentation
- 10 hours to build the poolish at 32C seems like a long time at a warm temp. you should have more than just little bubbles forming at top. i would guess that it could go past ripeness at the length.
- 50% of flour used in the poolish is a very high percent of preferment, will mean a short bulk fermentation time
- the dough in the photo looks like the gluten has broken down from too much acid (my guess at least)
Is this pure experimentation or is this based on a recipe? curious to see the recipe for this one.
-James
Wow,
I suppose I'll really learn a lot from this. I found a little window of time this morning and was considering to pop it in oven to see how it goes. Your reply sealed the deal. Will report back the result with long explanation soon.
Since it was so slack, I thought it looked like a ciabatta dough, so I whipped out cast iron skillet and bake (or probably you could say fry?) it as ciabatta would (pun...kinda intended, sorry =p)
Annnndddd... it failed as expected. It had a little oven spring which gave me a little hope then browned very slowly; probably because of the acidity. The result was a dense, chewy, and gummy bread. Not as tangy as I thought it would be though. It was still edible so I wasn't too sad about it.
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Back to your questions; This is a pure experimentation. It was just a little of something here and there I learnt from past recipe or some article/discussion putting together and pushed to extreme. Didn't expect them to multiply in effect together at all.
- Counting oil in hydration is totally new to me. I'll take note of that; thank you.
- The poolish ferment time. In fact, I didn't plan for it to be this long; but I was caught up with other things longer than expected. I planned for it to be around 6 hours (would that be too long still?). At first I also thought by that time it should have been overripe, but I saw no sign of it dropping down from the side of the bowl so I thought it hadn't. Probably that was wrong judgement. Still, I thought it wouldn't be harm even if it is overripe; never second think myself I was using 50% poolish though...
- The addition of vinegar was for flavour, kinda yes. I found it somewhere here acidity helped enhancing the yeast and gave dough more rise so I thought using balsamic would be killing two birds with one stone. I must have gone overboard with everything this time. The last time which was success (maybe? now I'm second-guessing myself), I didn't have time to prepare poolish, and there were Parmesan and rosemary, so I just mixed everything together, S&F, let ferment in fridge for about 6 hours or less overnight, and baked in the morning. It was okay despite the vinegar was likely to be in a bigger proportion compared to this time. I never know acidity can breakdown gluten, but thinking back after the fact, it should have been obvious that acid and protein never play nice together; that was big mistake considering everything I let slide in this recipe: the poolish over-ripeness and percentage, careless ferment time, vinegar, etc. Acidity must have dropped too low; lower than only bigger proportion of vinegar I used last time; or protein in Parmesan might have helped absorb some portion of it?
I would suggest taking a popular recipe for sourdough. get super confident with it. then do small tweaks to experiment. It really is more science than art.
Check out FoodGeek on YouTube as well. he does tons of experiments with sourdough and has good recipes too.
-James
Oil does not hydrate flour so not part of hydration.
Thoughts...
I don't see any additional yeast to help raise the final dough. Also don't know how much yeast in the poolish. A pinch? More than a pinch?
Agree, a large active preferment (poolish) leads to a short fermenting times with the dough. Temperature very important.
Why try to blend 100% hydrated poolish with 60% hydrated dough? Make the poolish and the dough the same hydration, then blend them, they should slip and slide less until the salt is added. You might want to lower the hydration to slow fermentation, 80% total may be too high.
If salt has large crystals, mortar them to a powder before sprinlking around and adding to dough. Salt controls fermentation. If poolish is overfermenting, perhaps salt should be added to poolish and/or shorten poolish time. Whole wheat ferments faster than regular flour. Take into consideration.
Vinegar? Add to the water and include as part of the water when measuring. How much went in? Taste the water, if stronger than what you can drink as refreshing, vinegar is too much. (Same with pickle juice, lemon juice, other vinegars and acids.)
Also recommend finding a good recipe and then tweak ONE thing after evaluating each bake.
Thanks for the correction, Mini.. I had recalled incorrectly about oil as part of hydration. I was thinking along the lines of percentage of liquid in the dough. Adding oil will add to the fluidity of the dough, amongst other thing...
I am kind of self-taught in bread baking because lean bread isn't really popular in my region and recipes that are flying around here would be soft, highly enriched bread. The first lean bread I baked was through trying to learn about different techniques used in artisan bread and blindly incorporate them together (haven't find this site yet at the time), it was like this time but far less wild though, and I somehow got some satisfying result. My core recipe now is kind of very basic lean bread recipe (or so I thought?) which I had satisfying result with from before which was, at the beginning, 95% white flour, 5% Whole wheat, 70% water, 4% oil, 2% salt, and 1% yeast with use of both tangzhong and poolish, and tweak it further along the way. I don't bake bread very often so I want to cram as much experimentation at once; it seems I try too many things this time. I was over-confident it wouldn't be this out of control and had to learn it the hard way. At least I think I have learned a lot from this failure but probably need some time to reflect on all the mistakes I've made.
Additional yeast; when I first tried using poolish, I didn't know I needed to add additional yeast later, which made me a little bit confused as the amount of yeast in poolish was far lower, but I concluded that they probably multiply during the fermentation to somewhere within the proper range and never give it a second thought. When I later learned about the additional yeast addition, I was a bit reluctant to follow suit since I had satisfying result before. Back to your question - my poolish had about a pinch of yeast. Should I be adding more at mixing?
Different hydration between poolish and dough; You're right; why try to blend different hydration dough together. It's just that I always used 100% hydration for poolish and never gave it a second thought. Then again, I've never used this much portion of poolish before. Normally it'd be around 35% only. Probably that's why it's never been an issue before and I've never thought I have to do something with it. I just read somewhere you can use up to 50% and wanted to try that out.
Effect of hydration rate on the fermentation rate and that whole wheat can speed up fermentation (did I infer that correctly?) is totally new to me; and adding salt to poolish never crossed my mind. Thank you; I will take note of that!
In conclusion, I suppose the issue with my dough this time is probably the dough being too acidic which is the result of over fermentation in many parts and amplify by the vinegar?
Anyway, many thanks to both of you for your time these valuable advice. I'll heed them well and stick to what previously worked, not tweaking everything at the same time like this anymore.