Tartine Troubleshooting
With the numerous amount of Tartine threads floating around these days, I figure I should add one more. I am posting with the request for some troubleshooting advice.
I have attempted to bake Tartine's Country Bread numerous times now, at least 10. My first few attempts turned out wonderful with great oven spring. Lately though, I feel like all of my loaves have come out flat or extremely dense. Yesterday, I started the dough and allowed for it to bulk ferment at 78 degrees for about 3 hours with S&F every 30 minutes, shaped, then retarded in the fridge overnight. Prior to that, I had been feeding my 8-month-old starter for two days before baking, twice a day (it was sitting in the fridge for a week at 1:5:5 ratio) for about a week. I baked it in a preheated combo cooker as suggested in the book for 20 minutes lid on and then ~22 minutes lid off. This is the result of my bake. I feel like the loaf is very dense and chewy compared to my previous early attempts at baking the bread. I'm starting to feel like each following attempt is getting worse and worse. I'm not sure what's going on. Please help!!
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Hi Ben,
Looks like we're pretty much having the same identical problems. Our crumb looks the same but at least you're getting good oven spring.
After re-reading the Tartine book and various postings, I think the problem I was having was partially caused by the starter. I don't think it was mature enough to fully raise the loaf during fermentation. The water I was using was cooler (~72 degrees F) than the recommended 76F in the book.
To prepare for my Saturday bake, I took my starter out of the fridge Thursday night and refreshed it once using a 1:2:2 ratio with water temp still at ~72 degrees (it's what comes out of my drinking water faucet). The next morning, I refreshed again using same water temp and same feed ratio. Friday evening, I refreshed my starter according to Robertson's forumla using 76F water. By Saturday morning, the starter had risen about 30% and was definitely bubbly and passed the float test. (I don't think it passed in previous attempts).
I made the dough and allowed to autolyse for 40 minutes, stretch and folded at 30 minute intervals up to 2 hours (4 S&Fs) and then allowed to ferment for another hour (total 3 hours bulk ferment) before dividing and shaping. I preshaped and shaped the doughs into boules following Robertson's instructions using a series of S&Fs to get into boule form, which I think helped develop even more strength. Both doughs proofed for about 3.5 hours in my garage at ~60F temp before transfering into preheated dutch oven/combo cookers using a parchment sling. I did still have some trouble with the slashing as the dough tended to stick to the blade and drag... Also, the slashes were very shallow as every attempt to go over the slash again seemed to cause the dough to drag even more.
I wasn't able to get any pictures of the result but the ovenspring was much improved and the doughs actually rose upwards and didn't become frisbees. My only qualms about this batch was that there were huge cavernous holes in the middle of the bread that made it EXTREMELY difficult to cut. Some pieces of bread that I cut was mainly just crust with a little bit of crumb... The holes I was getting looked pretty similar to Ben's pictures above, but slightly larger.
So, my question is, could this be due to not pressing out some of the large gas bubbles during the shaping process?