September 26, 2015 - 12:46am
Getting gringe unreliably.
Hi guys
The above are a couple of boules I made yesterday; same dough, split after kneading. Both were taken out of the fridge about 2 hours before baking, with the right- hand loaf being baked second (small oven).
I would have expected the first loaf to expand more and give better gringe, as it would have been cooler. Clearly not! The left hand is what I normally get, and the right is what I strive to achieve.
Can anyone suggest what I might have done differently? I don't think I shaped or preshaped one more than the other.
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but gringe isn't to be found there. So i did 2 Internet searches with Goole and Bing and no luck there either - so i guess the word doesn't really exist in the bread baking world and the spell checker here says it isn't a word either:-)
But I think you are thinking about bloom instead of gringe anyway. Normally you wouldn't be looking for gringe also known as 'ears' on a boule and wouldn't score to get one - you would be looking for a vertical score and bloom instead. Sadly, if you search ears you don't get any bread definitions either.
I'm guessing both of your loaves are over proofed - the one on the left more so - but you are close! Well done and
Happy baking .
...from the fridge two hours before you baked. Hence the over-proofing. I suspect you just need to bake them a little earlier. Have you tried baking direct from the fridge? It's usually produces an excellent oven spring.
Oh the shame, not only using the wrong word, but misspelling it too!
I tend to get a lot of uncontrolled rupturing of the loaf when I bake earlier than this; I'll try baking it just a little earlier, and see how it gets on. Thank you both for your advice.
Russell.
A few thoughts.
You say that your 2nd baked boule is on the right. How long did the oven heat up to temp prior to baking the 1st? Were these baked in a Dutch Oven? If so, was the D.O. heated up in the oven for the "requisite" 45 minutes too?
Depending on how long you had your boules resting in the refrigerator. Were they truly were in for a full overnight snooze? Considering that boules have a lot of girth, they don't cool down to refrigerator temp. within a few minutes. All of those minutes that the boule stays above ~40dF the dough continues to ferment, so by the time that you take it out the next day, there has been a lot of "unscheduled" time that the dough continued on toward its mature destiny.
I bake everything directly out of the refrigerator, no final bench proofing for me, and I get what I'd consider to be a really good oven spring/ear/bloom/grigne... All other things considered, including the next paragraph down, give it a try.
This, BTW, is the next paragraph down ;-) . If you look around TFL for pictures of successful blooms on boules you will hardly ever see a single score/slash on a boule. Find a pattern of scoring on boules that you like and think would offer your dough a chance to get some good oven spring (sans blowouts) and try that.
An easy way to see a lot of pictures of different boules is to go to the Bread Browser from the Navigation list in the upper right of the web page when you are logged in.
Since this is not "Friday the 13th", Halloween" or "Elm Street" I can comfortably say happy slashing!
alan
Hi Alan,
The bread went into the fridge at bed time, but it hadn't really proofed enough, so I took them out of the fridge to finish when I turned the oven on to prehear (then go back to bed!); the oven and stone had about 1.5 hours before the bread went in. I used to score a cross, but I got even less spring - which going by what was said earlier, gives credence to the probability of it being over-proofed.
I'll be putting a batch in the fridge tonight, so I'll have another crack at baking straight from there, tomorrow morning.
Thanks for you advice!
to learn about bread baking is knowing when the dough is ready for the eat and having the oven ready for it at the same time. I stopped long shaped retards because the bread was always over proofing in the fridge if it was in there longer than 8 hours. So to cure that, i do a bulk retard foe=r as long as I want and then do a quick pre-shape right out of the fridge and then do a final shape an hour later. Then I only let it proof 50% (not 100%) after that before it goes in the heat.
If it does over proof when shaped in the fridge - all you have to do is reshape it and let it final proof again but once again only let it proof to 50%.
Happy Baking
Thanks guys; after shaping last night and placing it in the fridge, the sourdough was about 50-70% proofed this morning.
A bit worried that it would explode in the oven, it was the best controlled bloom to date. Good spot!
Your are getting that proofing thing down! Well done and Happy baking
Yes it's much better; now to repeat the process! Thank you for the tips. :)