no big holes
I am so jealouse of all of the wonderful Sourdough breads I see posted on the site. Darn!! they all have big holes! My starter is made from organic raisens and has turned out to be active and have a genuine sour taste. Makes great soudough English Muffins but my bread although sour and has a good all around taste just lays there. There are small holes through out but none of the big signature holes I see in the pictures that torture me on the site. Now I have been baking for some time and my breads made with old dough or straight from the start come out fine but my Sourdough is kind of wet although it is baked for 1 hour in a ceramic baker @ 500 for 20 min-- then the top is removed and baked 10 min more at this temp. then turned down to 400 for 20 min and then the last 10 at 350. The crust is fabulous, but relatively no holes and not a lot of oven spring and somewhat dense. What am I doing wrong...sob. Pam
Pam, remember that sourdough breads generally don't rise as high as yeasted breads. Generally speaking, they also need more time to rise than yeasted breads. What could also be the case is that you just used a too low hydration dough. The high initial oven temperature could also be a factor; when the crust sets too soon, the dough won't able to rise to its potential height.
Everything I've written above are just some general issues that could've caused your dense bread. In order to get a more accurate answer, you'll have be more specific on the techniques you used in making the bread mentioned.
Pam, technique plays a large role in the development of an open crumb. You can get a nice crumb on 65% hydrated dough.
If you use the TFL search bar using "open crumb" as your search words, you'll come up with lots of hits.
Here's a good place to start: http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/11527/secret-open-crumb