Irregular holes in Sourdough bread - help please :(
Hey everyone,
How's it going? I hope all is well.
I've been recently running into an issue regarding oven spring and irregular holes with my sourdough bread.
I usually bake with a cast iron dutch oven and usually get very good oven spring and consistency.
Recently, I've tried to start utilizing my pizza stone to bake multiple loaves at a time.
To first test it, I've been baking some loaves for the last few days, but have been having some severe problems with my bread. My starter is very active, usually overflows from the container in about 8 hours. The recipe I use is as follows:
800gr of unbleached strong bakers flour
200gr of wholemeal
200gr of rye sourdough starter
20gr of salt
700gr of tepid water
I start off my feeding my starter the night before using a 1:5:5 feeding cycle. So 25gr mature starter, 125gr organic rye flour and 125gr water. I also start my autolyse the night before by mixing my flours and water and letting it sit for about 10 hours. In the morning, I test it by pulling a window (window pane) and it passes everytime.
In the morning, I mixed in my starter and salt at the same time to the dough and bulk ferment for 5 hours, at the moment my kitchen is about 21 degrees celcius. Within the first two hours of bulk fermentation, i stretch and fold 4 times.
After stretching and folding, I shape my loaves into boules and place them into the bannetons, and proove them for about 3-3.5 hours at room temp. In the last 40 mins of the proving, I place them in the freezer as this makes scoring much easier.
In the last hour of proving, I switch my oven on to its max (250 degrees C) and place my pizza stone in it with a cake pan that has lava stones in it underneath the pizza stone on the oven base. I then score my loaf and put it straight on the pizza stone and put in about 500ml of water on the lava stones and immediately close the door. I bake the loaf in this way for 20-25 mins, then open the oven door to dry out the oven and take the lava stones out. I then bring my oven down to about 220 degrees c and bake my loaves for another 10-15 mins.
Here are the pictures of my loaves (I'm not sure why the first loaf is coming up upside down as I've tried uploading the picture 3 times) :