Higher-Hydration Sourdough Problems
Hi folks,
I've been wanting to try higher-hydration doughs, so I recently upped the hydration in my go-to recipe by 15%. My recipe is as follows:
Leaven: 39g starter, 237g water, 191g flour (note: I did not up the hydration in my leaven; that remains the same).
Dough: 1178g flour, 738g water, 4tsp salt. (So I guess that's a little over 60% hydration?)
COOK: Made leaven the night before. Following morning, mixed in leaven with water, then flour. Autloyse for about 40 minutes.
Kneaded very briefly with wet hands in order to cohere the dough. Then I placed it in a tall plastic pitcher to bulk ferment, with stretch-and-folkds every twenty minutes for an hour then every thirty minutes for another hour. A little over two hours for bulk ferment, all told.
NOTE: I have never really worked exclusively with stretch-and-fold before; up until now I've kneaded and then incorporated some S&F into the bulk ferment. But this dough was too wet to knead. So this is really kind of my first time working exclusively with S&F.
I'm wondering if I didn't do it right. After a couple of hours, when I dumped the dough on the counter for shaping, it was like liquid dough. I mean, it was still obviously dough. But it was VERY runny, certainly more so than anything I'd ever worked with.
With some difficulty, I was able to get two boules out of it. Let them rest for five minutes then put them into banneton baskets with flour-rubbed cloth liners. They proofed for another two hours. EASILY the best proof I've ever gotten---they rose right up.
Preheated the oven to 500 with a combo cooker (really about 480, my temp is a bit off), then dumped the loaves one after the other into the combo. They were too sticky, I didn't use enough flour, resulting in the dough getting stuck to the liners. Lot of difficulty getting them out.
Once in the combo and after being disentagled from the liner, the boules spread out like puddles. Still clearly dough but very loose and spread-y. I slashed what I could with my lame, and in they went.
Well, they rose better than I expected, and the crumb actually ended up being quite good. But obviously they're not anywhere near what I want them to be. I'm used to a much, much better rise than this. Can anyone give me some tips? Am I not S&Fing enough? Is my bulk ferment too short? Help!