What did I do to my dough?!
I made my first sourdough breads from my new starter the other day. I divided the dough in two, created batards, and baked one last night and the other this afternoon.
Yesterday's bread was pretty good- just a little too hard on the bottom for my taste due to my getting used to new baking equipment and calculating incorrectly. Today's dough was a different matter: it had to warm up before baking. An unexpected problem arose when my room mates had to use the oven, causing the dough to stay out over an hour longer than necessary (I was worried that putting it in the fridge again would cause even more problems).
I baked it using the same techniques as yesterday (by the way, I use Peter Reinhart's barm and sourdough recipes because I love them) but this time the bread was barely brown after 30 minutes of baking. I took it out in under 40 minutes- thumping the bottom seemed to produce a hollow sound, and the internal temperature seemed about right (my current thermometer reaches only 190 but it went over that, as yesterday's bread did).
I was wondering how leaving the dough out for a longer time might have caused this. My theory has something to do with dough temperature effecting the sugars. Am I going in the right direction? I haven't tasted the bread yet, by the way- it's cooling as I type.