Autolyse expirement
Hi Everyone. I have been baking 2-3 loaves a day trying different techniques and trying to get the highest loaves possible. I measure each bread that I make for width and height. One thing I noticed is that sometimes my bread was more squat for the same recipe then other times and I wasn't sure why. When I do my recipes they always give a time range to autolyse (i.e. let bread rest for 20-40 minutes). I usually set my timer for the middle of the time period but sometimes I get to them at the low end and sometimes I get to to them at the high end. This is the only thing that varied so I decided to do a test and see if it was the autolyse causing the problem. I made two of the same breads, using flour from the same bag, yeast from the same batch, two of the same dutch ovens, in two of the same ovens (both tested to make sure their temperatures were the same). I folded them the same number of times, they sat next to each other in the same spot and I made them together with the exception that one had a 30 minute autolyse and the other had no autolyse. What I found was that the non-autolyse was higher and less squat than the autolysed version. The crumb and crust looks the same. Here's pictures. The non-autolyse is on the left and the autolysed version is on the right.