Need some help
I've been working on a wheat bread for a while now and still having trouble. First, the recipe for 3lbs of dough:
50/50 bread flour/WW flour
67% water
10% butter
5% sugar
2% salt
1.8% Fleischmann's active dry yeast
The night before I set up a 100% poolish with half of the bread flour (so 25% of the total flour) and a pinch of the yeast. This will do it's thing for 6 hours or so before I mix the dough. Poolish, remaining flour and water, and the rest of the yeast goes into my 6qt KitchenAid Pro with dough hook on low just long enough to mix, usually 2 minutes or so. After a 20 minute autolyse I knead on 2nd or 3rd spead for 4 minutes, add the butter and sugar, then knead for a further 4-5 minutes. I shoot for a dough temp in the mid-60s. I'll bulk ferment for 1 hour, with stretches at 20 and 40 min, then seperate into 9" loaf pans. I let these rise until level with the top of the pans then bake for 1 hour at 375. I look for 200-205 on the thermometer. I'll bake uncovered for 15 min then cover with foil for the remainder to keep the crust soft.
The flavor is just fine; I like it, wife, loves it, and the kids insist on it for their school lunch sandwiches. The biggest roblem I have with it is loaf volume. Initially I split the dough into my 2-loaf Italian bread pan. When I decided to use the loaf pans I split it 3 ways: two 9" pans and one 10x5 pan. None of these would come close to filling the pan without over-proofing and collapsing upon slashing. So I tried splitting the dough in half, first between one 9" and one 10" pan, then 2 9" pans. Still, although they rise to fill the pan, I get almost no oven spring and the finished loaves are only a little over half the height of a normal sandwich loaf. Obviously it's also very dense.
It seems that a 67% dough should have plenty of water a good oven spring, but I get better performance out of my 62% white Italian bread. I've thought about vital wheat gluten but from reading on here it seems more appropriate for 100% WW bread; the bread flour provides enough gluten. So I'm looking for suggestions and critical analysis. If there are technique issues I've not addressed already just ask and I'll give more detail. Thanks in advance for all your help!