I’m going to sound like a fool. I’ve been making breads of all types for about 10 years and sourdough for about 8. I have NEVER made a single sourdough that is OK. Ever. Why can't I just give up? I’m like that with Yorkshire puddings too. I have a blind spot in those two areas despite being fine in the kitchen generally. And all my other breads are great (though I say so myself) and two separate friends have told me that I make the best bread they’ve ever had! I know that sounds show-offy, but I want to emphasise the difference between the breads.
I try so hard with the sourdough. I use the discard in all the other breads I make so it is well fed. I have tried various percentages of starter, various hydration, various flour. Sometimes I stretch and fold, sometimes coil fold, sometimes envelop fold. Sometimes I retard, sometimes not. I use an aliquot jar. I’m currently using Marriages Manitoba flour. I really think that if I can’t get it right on the next one then I should give in gracefully – I mean after 8 years… I can’t really think of any advice that people can give me that I haven’t tried and failed at. What can I be doing wrong? So very wrong. The loaves rarely have an ear. Sometimes incredibly dense, sometimes flat. Differently wrong each time.
This latest one:-
475g flour
360g water
8g salt
50g starter
I did three sets of stretches and folds in the first hour and a half. Then left it at about 16 Centigrade for 12 hours and nothing happened at all. Then I put it in the oven with the light on for another 2 hours and it rose a bit (say 15-20% in aliquot jar) and then I took it out to let it carry on at 16 degrees again. But it went back down. Did it over prove just in those two hours? Anyway then I shaped it and put it in the fridge in a banetton for a couple of hours. When I shaped it, it was really loose, though not too sticky. I baked it with steam for 20 mins at 240 degrees and then for 8 mins without steam.
Here is the result – it doesn’t look as bad in the photos – but it was flat and dense, the ends were sort of OK, but massive holes in the middle. It is only 6cm at its highest point!
For the love of God please tell me what I’m doing wrong. Should I not have put it in the oven with the light on? Should I have carried on doing more stretch and folds? The starter didn’t float though it had doubled when I used it. Should I have started it in the oven with the light on? Was it under or over proved?
Thank you so much for any advice for this desperate of all desperate bakers. My husband is desperate too - he really wants me to give up because a) it makes me sad and angry each time I fail and b) I force him to eat unpleasant dense and sticky bread whenever I try (I can't stand waste) and c) I can make really nice bread! - so why bother with this.
At that temperature, it will ferment very slowly, as you have experienced. Try fermenting it at about 25C. It should be more lively when it is warmer.
My rule of thumb is that if it is warm enough for me to be comfortable in shorts and a T-shirt, the yeasts are going to be happy, too.
Paul
Oh thank you. So I shouldn't just have left it longer? Does it not work like that?
Sadly in our house I'm never happy to be in shorts and a t-shirt. Perhaps I should join the sourdough in the oven.
Bread is usually very tolerant of different techniques. That's actually true of sourdough breads too. You do have to have patience and pay attention to what the dough is actually doing, rather than going by a schedule regardless. Learning to do that is essential, though not necessarily hard.
Looking at your picture, I see a bread that basically looks all right, but undercooked. The large cavities look like the shaping methods need some improvement. It's possible that the dough was underfermented too, but I don't think that was a big factor.
The indication that the baking temperature was too high, and the baking time was too short, is that the interior mostly has a glistening, glazed appearance. That suggests that it got hot enough to gelatinize but not hot enough to completely bake. When the temperature is too high, the crust finishes cooking before the heat has fully penetrated to the inside. If the baking continues, the crust gets overcooked before the inside finishes. When it's too low, the inside cooks but the crust gets too dried out and thick without much browning. So I would bake at around 200 - 210C for 40 minutes, just to get a starting point.
The large cavities mean that the dough had some large gas bubbles when it was shaped, and these got embedded in the dough. Large bubbles need to be removed, either by degassing the dough before shaping, or by pricking them during shaping.
Fermentation continues at lower temperatures, including in the refrigerator, but more slowly. The rate is very dependent on the temperature. Since the dough temperature drops slowly, especially in the middle, after the dough is put into the cold, you will get more fermentation than you might expect until the entire mass of dough has cooled down.
As to the stickiness and other handling qualities of the dough, you haven't written enough for me to make suggestions, though it may be that the dough was relatively wet and needed more kneading or stretching.
TomP
This is why I despise social media baking. It put pressure on home bakers to be competitive for no reason.
With that amount of years under your belt, I think it's a good idea to ask yourself, why you bake in the first place? To be competitive? Against who? If you just bake and be okay with whatever comes out of your oven, how do you feel about it? Does that make you less than a person?
Celebrate the fact that you make bread at home. How awesome is that! And if you can't adhere to it for whatever reason, then it's not for you in the first place, and that's totally okay! Time to explore another fulfilling activities 😆
And don't forget the fact that niche interests tend to shape acquired taste that many people outside of the subjects won't ever understand in the first place. If your friends think your bread is that good, then nothing else matters :)
And to quote our favorite, homegrown, TFL owned bot...
"Enjoy!" (sorry Davey, can't help it, I'll behave lol 😂)
Jay
Well, yes, I agree with the social media baking comment and I don't actually use social media very much, though I have watched various baking techniques on YouTube. I can hardly use it myself, when I don't allow my children to!
But the thing is that I'm competitive with myself. I can't bear the fact that sourdough has beaten me! I can make all of the normal yeast breads, even brioche and croissants and stuff, and they are great and I don't have a problem with them at all. It is just the sourdough and it is so frustrating. And you are right, I should probably just enjoy the breads that I'm good at making and that people enjoy, rather than persisting in something I"m not good at and never get right. Those loaves never make me happy... And the other ones do! But here I am, trying and trying! Go figure 😆. I'm also trying to write a book - I should do that rather than making wretched sourdough.
alot of parallels here, pasc:
--as someone who has served up an insane amount of "unpleasant dense and sticky bread" to my partner, I feel your pain. Just yesterday, I baked up a deli rye that hardly rose. It came out of the oven looking halfway between a discus and a medieval hat. It was meant to be the base for pastrami sandwiches for my father's 102nd (!!!!) birthday. But I brought it with me to the party and sliced it up and, just when I was about to apologize to everyone for the failed bread, my unfailingly critical partner opined that it actually had a sweetness that contrasted amazingly well with the spiced, smoked, steamed meat and salty full-sour pickle. It turned out to be a failure that everyone loved! What could be better?
--I am also trying to write a book -- and, yes, baking serves as an amazingly time consuming repetitive act of procrastination (as does posting stuff on this site🤣). But it also reminds me: books are imperfect objects, too. My words are bound to fail in so many ways, just as my breads are -- and, honestly, I wouldn't have it any other way.
Rob
PS -- brilliantly meta, Jay: I really want it to be true that Floyd and Dorota created Davey and that he/they is here as a kindly anti-hero 'bot in shining armor,' showing all the other bots the error of their ways. Enjoy!
Gosh, Rob, you want to be careful what you feed your father at 102! If you hadn't been able to eat yours, then you could have created some sort of party discus-throwing game. But wonderful, congratulations on having such a long-lived father, hope he enjoyed his pastrami sandwiches - I love them too. Good luck with the book! And thank you for your supportive words - I'm glad it's not just me. Pascale
--My father's outlived the guardrails within which we think people should operate. These days, his caloric intake centers around red meat and dark chocolate.
--what do you want to bet that Olympic shot put and discus originated as "how far can I throw the failed sourdough?"
--As for baking: honestly, you've come to right place. There's lots of super generous and knowledgeable people here.
Rob
Thank you Tom, that is the one that I have never considered and never changed! - The baking temperature. I thought my shaping technique was OK - I do a rectangle and then roll up for that shape of bread. Though I only do preshapes when I make baguettes. Perhaps I should consider doing a preshape with this loaf too and that might also deal with the big bubble issue - I don't have the big bubble issue though, when I make non-sourdough. I guess also that part of my problem is that I change things all the time in my eagerness to get it right and so often it seems that I can't quite work out which of the many changes that I've made have caused the problem. But I will now experiment with shaping and oven temperature. Thanks again
About shaping - it's not often discussed in the materials I have read, but the pre-shape is where you get a chance to adjust for your dough's qualities. If it's soft and tends to slump, you can stretch and work it to bring out elasticity. If it's too firm and elastic, just ball it up gently and let it rest before shaping the loaf, or go directly to gently shaping the final loaf. If the dough still tends to spread too much, you can use one or another stitching technique as well to help hold the loaf together (search on the internet for videos).
You wrote that your dough was "loose". So patting it into a rectangle and rolling it up probably didn't stretch it enough to bring out much elasticity. You could have stretched it out (gently) to a large, thin rectangle, then balled it up, then formed that ball into a loaf. IThis process would have added elasticity, and made for a loaf that held its shape better and ended up higher. Still, the picture you included didn't look "too flat" to me.
I think you should reduce the hydration of your dough until you can consistently make loaves reliably. Shoot for, let's say, 65%, although if you are using bread flour instead of all-purpose it could be several points higher. In general, don't go flailing around changing things until you get consistency. Make a change, evaluate, make another change, and so on. You seem to be good at baking yeasted breads,and sourdough really isn't any different except for all the stages taking longer.
Just to give you a baseline, here's how a typical process goes for me with a lean sourdough using around 25% starter. Room temperature is around 72 - 75 deg F/ 22 - 24C. Note that I mix and knead by hand but that's just me. Many people use a mixer.
None of the details I've listed above are important, in the sense that they must be followed exactly. They can all be varied to suit your dough and your convenience. The process flow should guide you. Don't obsess over the kind of folds, whether to proof in an oven with oven light on, how many stretch-and-folds to use, etc., etc. Unless you have to crank out large numbers of repeatable loaves, those details are not important. You can learn to judge by the dough's progress itself.
Using sourdough instead of straight yeast gives you a big advantage - the long fermentation times help develop the dough and its gluten, so that you don't have to get it "right" at the beginning. Those long times also develop more flavor, even aside from the sourdough aspect.
Thank you, Tom, I wrote a long reply to you yesterday, but then apparently I'd posted too many times in 24 hours and so it disappeared. And I'm in a rush now as about to go out. But thank you so much for your help - it is very much appreciated and so interesting/helpful to see what successful people do! I have never done any strengthening beyond a couple of hours (apart from a disastrous attempt at Pan de Cristal) as I've always thought that that would ruin any rise and make bubbles tiny. I have more ideas now. And am going to make another attempt this evening!
Good luck! I hope I've conveyed to you that there is no one right way, just variations on a theme (or a few themes). And even if you don't get a loaf to look the way you had in mind, you are almost certain to get something tasty and good to eat.
https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/13771/simple-sourdough-909
Or
https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/12006/63-hydration-sourdough
You won't fail.
Yippee
OK - I will, Yippee! Though I'm sure if anyone can, I will fail!
Just work on shaping - smaller holes in other words. Enjoy!
Why not feed, document the temperature, how quickly and how much it rises?
Post your notes with photos here and get feedback on the health of your starter. That's the best place to start. I cannot believe that someone who bakes very well and has a healthy starter has not had one decent sourdough bread in 8 years. Perhaps you are doing everything right but your starter is wrong.
Marriages flour? UK I'm guessing. If you're in London then I'm your neighbour. If you're determined to get this right then I will help as much as I can. We can even do a bake together.
Don't give up.
+1 (except the last paragraph regarding UK and London)