Comedy Bread

Tony, Tony, I am glad to see you have a sense of humor in your baking. Welcome to the site. I look forward to seeing more of your loaves.

Eric

Hello Tony, and welcome;
Your photos reminded me of a blowout on one of my loaves:

Underproofed? Weak spot at the bottom seam after shaping? Not sure what happened either!
:^) from breadsong

A couple of thoughts:

Certainly underproofed.  Perhaps in an environment where the humidity was too low and the surface dried out. 

Or perhaps it was retarded at too low of a temperature and not allowed to warm up in a humid place before oven entry.

The blowout is not in an unexpected place - all othere things being equal, the weak spot is almost always on the bottom, at the intersection of the sidewall and where the loaf contacts the baking surface (or at the edge of the pan if you are baking pan bread).

And I think you are right, that a more agressive blade might have allowed the expansion to take place at the slash.

Now to replicate it on purpose. You have a new bread form, like the baguette, caplet, tobacco pouch, split loaf, bow tie, etc. Yours is the toque.

cheers,

gary

Tony,
I would go a little bit warmer, and protected from drying out with some plastic wrap, a trash bag, or a big Tupperware bowl. Just remember why you are retarding - to allow the LAB to crank out more acid before the yeast is done fully inflating the dough. The loaf should expand as it would a room temperature (perhaps double or whatever you usually see with that dough when not retarded). At 10°C and a good amount of expansion you can bake directly from the retarder. And for every retard temperature, there is a corresponding time so it will proof faster at 10°C than at 4°C. As you already know, it is easier to slash a cold loaf, but be as aggressive as you need to be to balance and relieve the oven spring by controlled expansion. Done right, you will get all of the CO2 as some surface blisters and either pre-bake volume expansion or oven spring (or as you have shown - a blowout).
Doc

Hi Tony!

Your loaf tried to make a football shape before it had the blowout. In my experience that is a guarantee the surface was too dry and almost certainly the oven was too dry (not humid enough) to gelatinize the starch in the crust and keep it flexible. Had it not blown out you would have had a loaf with a football profile.  The fact that it blew out so violently suggests the loaf was pretty seriously underproofed. 

As a rule one should slash underproofed loaves more deeply than normal or overproofed loaves for they need more room to expand. I would agree your slashes were shallow. Deeper would have helped but...might not be enough. How do you generate steam in your oven?

Jay

Tony,

Don't worry too much about the steam until you have the rest of the process under control.  It looks like you can mix a good dough so work on the proofing part.  The effect of steam is to more quickly cook the surface starch (quite a bit more quickly than radiation alone, and even more quickly than high-speed convection). It is my belief that an important byproduct of rapid surface gelatinization is  blisters when the dough has a chance to absorb CO2 during a cool proof/retardation when the solubility of CO2 goes up as the dough temperature goes down.  Then when you hit it with steam, the surface starch cooks forming a gas tights membrane.  As the temperature of the dough just below the surface rises, the solubility of the CO2 goes down and the CO2 comes out of solution.  With no way to escape, it forms blisters under the (now cooked) surface starch.  Higher gluten flours, lower hydration doughs, cooler retardation temperatures under high humidity conditions with little air movement, and short delays between retard and oven entry seem to enhance the effect.

Doc