February 10, 2016 - 12:43am
how old should a sourdough starter be to produce a good oven spring
hi,
Can someone shed some light on how old a sourdough starter needs to be to leaven a dough so well that it can have a good oven spring? Does a 1 month old starter has any potential? Is there any correlation between the age of the starter and the probability of the oven spring, and the volume of the oven spring?
thanks!
Liming
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I'd say it depends on your feeding schedule. Whenever I make a new one, it's usually ready after 7 days, feeding once a day!
If yours is one month old, but kept in the fridge, a couple feedings before using should do the trick.
According to my observations the oven spring is not only dependent of the starter strength but also how much strength you have developed in gluten framework during bulk fermentation and final proofing. Overproofed dough will have no oven spring. Also final shaping plays enormous role in oven spring - do it wrong and you will have smaller oven spring. Bake without steam and your oven spring will be smaller. At the end I would say that probably the strength of the starter has a minor role in oven spring. Every starter that leavens your dough normally is good enough, but you have to fulfill also above mentioned conditions to get a very strong oven spring.
Kind regards,
Joze
thanks Joze, for your input ! You have a very keen and elaborate observation! I wonder if the initial high baking temperature is also critical, allowing the dough to get an instant temperature boost?
cheers!
Liming
I would say not just the temperature which should be between 230-260 C, but also the thermal mass where you put your bread. I am lucky having a wood fired oven for baking bread/pizzas. Usually I start baking at 240-250 C and I always get a decent oven spring as the thermal mass of the oven hearth is very high and this really helps a lot to produce nice oven spring. When I was baking loaves with 87% to 88% hydration I got decent oven spring only in my wood fired oven. Baking the same loaves in my steam oven ( a brand new one where I was baking at 230 C and high degree of steam for first 25 minutes) gave me poor results although I was using baking stone 3cm thick. The bread was flat. Also baking in a dutch oven didn't significantly improve results and the oven spring was quite small.
So all these experiments gave me the idea that the right temperature and amount of thermal mass available in the first minutes of baking are very important. This is the reason why I can afford to bake with high hydration when the dough is really hardly manageable and still achieve great results in the wood fired oven.
Finally I must say that these are my current observations and conclusions which might be also wrong as I am in a learning process, so this might change in the future.
and how do you judge if a shaping is done right or wrong?
You know if you've done the shaping wrong if you pull the bread out of the oven and you're not happy with the way it looks. In more technical terms, it usually means that you shaped it too tightly (the dough will start to tear a little bit during shaping) or too loosely (the dough will never hold its own shape). There are also other issues with shaping (unhydrated flour inside the loaf) to be wary of.
To chime in on the relationship between the age of a starter and its ability to leaven a loaf of bread properly, it really depends on who you ask, and for most it depends on the feeding schedule, the environment, and the type of flour/water they are using. For some, a good starter can be had in less than a week's time; for others, three weeks are required. Because each starter is a relatively unique ecosystem within the context of another unique ecosystem (your home, presumably), it will perform in its own way. Thus, it is difficult to say definitively that a starter will give you a good oven spring after X number of days. What I can say with near certainty, is that you probably WON'T get a good oven spring with a starter BEFORE 5 days. But prove me wrong !