Lazy riser
Hello all,
Thanks to your wonderful help earlier, I own a wonderful active starter that behaves very well. I feed it, it grows to a sponge, colapses, I discard and refeed and the cycle of life continues unchanged. Wonderful.
However, when I go to bake the sourdough loaf, the final product has very little oven spring and doesnt rise nearly as much as a similar recipe using instant yeast.
I'm shooting for a regular 1-2-3 recipe and the dough rises very well after kneeding (passes windowpane test then I let it sit for 8 hours while I go to work). When I come home, I take it out of the bowl, fold it a couple of times which de-gasses it a little but not completely, then let it rest in the bread loaf tin for 20 mins before into a very hot oven. (To be more specific, I start with 50 grams of starter sponge the night before, feed it 100g flour and 100g water and in the morning I weigh, then add 2x weight in water (might be about 250 ml) and 3x weight in flour (maybe 375g), mix, autolyse 10 mins, kneed for 10 mins to get a nice windowpane then back to a lightly oiled bowl where it does a fabulous rise during the day).
When I follow the essence of these steps with instant yeast, I get badda-bing-badda-boom big loaves. With my sourdough, I get a Gaulic shrug of a rise, maybe an extra 50% of total volume. Bread tastes nice and not overly sour but just isnt enthusiastic enough for me to sign off on being happy with our performance.
Does anyone have any suggestions?
Thank you kindly,
Stuart
Does it rise till double in the pan? It seems to me that you're not leaving it for long enough before baking.
A rest of only 20 minutes between shaping/panning and then baking is just not enough for your dough to recover from the degassing during handling. After all, you let it bulk ferment 8 hours; it needs some time to reinflate during the final fermentation, too. And wild yeasts aren't nearly as fast-growing as commercial yeasts, either, so there isn't much reason to expect that a sourdough bread is going to ferment as rapidly at any stage as a bread made with commercial yeasts.
Maybe it's time to switch measurements. Instead of going by the clock, go by what the dough says. If it has reinflated to dome above the rim of the pan, and if feels ready (poke test, squeezing, however you like to check), then it should go into the oven.
I hope this helps.
Paul