Fault parallel to side crust.
I'm occasionally seeing a vertical fault in the crumb of my loaves. The loaves are baked in sandwich tins and the fault runs parallel to the crust on one, and only one, of the long sides. I've never had a loaf, yet, with two faults. It's not always visible when I first cut into the loaf and often only appears when a slice is being buttered with not-quite-soft-enough butter.
I don't use extra flour when shaping, so it's not one of those faults. The crumb has a pretty even density top to bottom, and there's no flying crust, so it's not due to sheering. At least, not from the dough sagging, but oven spring could exert a vertical sheering force, I suppose.
The current loaf doesn't have the fault, so I can't produce a photo at the moment, but I wondered if anyone else had come across this and had figured out what causes it.
Sounds like oven spring. So either the crust is forming too fast or the dough is under-proofed (or a combination). Normally pan breads don't require steaming, but you might give steaming a try or try proofing longer.
I do slash and steam but the side crust is inside the pan, of course, so I doubt the steam has any effect on any but the top crust.
Using spelt, I try to take the dough a bit early so that it doesn't collapse on me. BTDTGTTS. Perhaps I should be a little less cautious. I don't get the fault all the time, however, so I'm probably in the right ballpark most of the time.
Thanks for the reply.
I was wondering if the crack was inside the pan or not. Since you said it was at the crust I assumed not. In that case, I would say to proof it more. Push it a little further and see if it helps. It doesn't sound like it needs much more, but try a little longer and see.
I need to find a repeatable way of identifying when the dough's ready to go. At the moment I'm going by its height in the tin and the way it reacts to a poke but that's evidently not sufficiently reliable. A minor niggle, but one I'd like to eliminate.