Oakland Sourdough Fail
Can anyone help with this one? My third attempt at the Oakland Sourdough was a failure. After last weekend's successful bake, I was confident - perhaps too confident (especially after all your kind compliments). My dough today would not keep shape at all during shaping and was extremely sticky. I baked it and it turned out exactly like this sourdough ciabatta: http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/2577/sourdough-ciabatta [1] Same exterior look, same height (or lack of), and same hole structure. Sure it tastes fine for a ciabatta but I need to know where the I might have gone wrong. What would have been the main reason(s) for this failure at the Oakland sourdough? Too much hydration? There are two things I could think of that I did differently from last week's bake:
1. The starter. Instead of my regular 100% hydration starter, I used one that was only a day out of the fridge, and to wake it up, I fed it 1 cup flour to 1 cup water. Sure enough, this morning, it was over flowing from the double/triple, but was super thin and runny. I used it (50g as the recipe calls for) in the levain build and it passed the float test. This 50g of runny starter couldn't have made such a significant difference to the loaf could it? Enough to make it from a San Fran style sourdough to a Ciabatta??
2. The temperature during bulkferment. I had a difficult keeping the temp in my oven during bulk ferment at the 82 degrees suggested for most sourdoughs. My guage was showing almost 90 degrees at times, and stayed around that temp for about 2 and half hours out of the 4 hours of bulk ferment. Could this have caused over fermentation/proofing? I am not yet familiar with the feel of overproofed dough, but during the last two stretches in the bowl, it had become very billowy but soft, jiggly and light feeling to the touch. Almost like puffy to the point where it felt like if I pinched the dough slightly, it would split very easily between my fingers.
Feedback would be greatly apreciated.
John