October 25, 2021 - 1:31pm
Sourdough gluten structure fell apart during mixing
Recipe:
2h autolyse-
1kg bread flour (700g white, 300g ww)
750g water
200g levain-
100g white bread flour
100g water
20g starter
20g salt + 20g water
I’ve made this recipe before without problems and the dough felt great and elastic right up until I added the salt + water. Now I can’t get any gluten formation. It’s like a sloppy porridge. Can’t even stretch and fold during bulk because it just slips through my fingers! Any ideas on what happened??
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Starter info needed - more info the better. Enjoy!
Starter is all bread flour, mature and very active. Fed 100g water and 100g bread flour to 20g starter to make levain in the morning and added 200g of that to autolyse when it had doubled.
Appears to be ok. Next - what may have changed from the usual - ie when all was ok?
and get lots of hooch on top? If so, the yeast/bacteria ratio might be out of balance even if it doubles after being recently fed. Mine did something similar and I had to spend a couple of weeks taking tiny portions of it and feeding it as soon as it peaked. This meant two to three times a day. I found the acetone smell and the hootch disappeared.
It was my own fault that it got out of balance. I fed it haphazardly while it sat in the fridge. Now I feed it once a week and give it a good stir. No more acetone smell or hootch and my bread is back to holding together during shaping.
Too much water I think and overmixing.
To repair gluten, add more salt to the level of 2.2-2.5% to total flour in the recipe and refrigerate dough for a few hours.
Thanks I’ll give this a try. Didn’t know you could overmix sourdough but I guess that’s what happened. It definitely got worse the more I worked with it.
For the water, 77% is usually not too much. It is humid today. But I’ve made higher hydration doughs on more humid days and the worst that’s happened is it’s a little stickier after bulk than I’d like but still manageable.
I've experienced both.... high hydration loaf that was fine, and high hydration that went to pudding during mixing. Reducing starter / water especially on warmer humid days helps. Fermentation goes way faster at higher room temps.
Did the salt pull water out of the dough or did it integrate?
The salt and extra 20g of water integrated in. I let the dough rest about 10 min after adding before kneading. Once I started kneading it just fell apart and never came back together.
Any of this flour freshly milled? Apparently could be an issue.
No it’s all store bought. Is that good or bad in this scenario?
Fresh milled can make some challenges but no worries if store bought.
This happened to me recently and my recipe failed whith the combination mixer + sourdough. The mix ended up feeling like glue. The recipe works fine with the combinations (hand mixing + sourdough) and (mixer + dry yeast) dough.
I have been doing two loaves a week for the last six months. I use mainly whole wheat flour but I have been experimenting many techniques with different combinations of WW and AP flours. I have found out a process that has given me consistent results with 100% WW flour for the last four weeks, and that works best with manual mixing.
Unfortunately I have no clear understanding why I get in trouble when I use the mixer with the sourdough recipe. I don't make enough bread to be in the position to compare all the fine points in the technique that can lead to this problem.
It may be the dough temperature that needs to be kept cooler with sourdough than with dry yeast. I will keep trying with the mixer and I'll let you know if I learn anything new.
If you use bran (whole grains) vigorous mixing may cause the bran shards to damage the gluten. You can sift them out and soak them or scald them to soften them up first.
The mixer can heat the dough if you are really going hard at it. You can put an ice pack under the bowl. However, another option is to allow the heat and out the bowl into the fridge for an overnight rise. The dough heat slowly diminishes but also rises the dough at the same time.
Thanks. I will chill the starter next time before mixing. The flour comes from the freezer. I will start mixing with a 60% hydration until the dough becomes a ball and then add the extra water (also chilled) until the dough gets to my target hydration value while mixing.