Hello bakers. First post.
I jumped on the Forkish bandwagon and started baking about a month ago. I've currently only made the Saturday white about 5 times, and the Overnight white three times.
My one day bread is fine- I'm still working on technique etc, but I'm making decent bread so no issues there.
However, the Overnight bread never works! The dough is way more wet/slack/sticky than the one-day bread, and collapses when it comes to getting ready for proofing. It doesn't rise at all during the proof period.
Could the kitchen temperature be too low overnight? Or maybe I should start with higher temp water than the daytime bread (I'm using ~32C)? Is the wet dough a sign of bulk fermentation not being finished?
In every overnight loaf, I ended bulk ferment after 13 hours, with a dough roughly 2.5 times larger.
Could anyone suggest a variable I could play with to fix this?
Thank you!
Nearly everyone who has followed a Forkish recipe has experienced something that can be tied to too much time. In particular, over-fermentation from leaving dough in a bulk fermentation too long. Raising the water temperature will only accelerate that process. The wet dough (do you mean slack dough?) is more likely a sign that the fermentation went past the optimal point. Try decreasing the amount of time that the dough ferments, and ... this is truly not just a slogan ... watch the dough, not the clock.
What I found necessary with Forkish recipes is to do all of the bulk fermentation during the day when I can watch the dough. My first attempt resulted in dough that looked great when I went to bed one night and was a slurry mess that resembled pancake batter when I awoke the next morning. If that sounds somewhat like what you experienced, then join the club. (Also, if you do a search on this site for Forkish, you will find many similar posts, and they are worth reading.)
Good luck with your baking. His Field Blend #2 is probably my go-to loaf for great bread, but I had to learn how to interpret his time frames.
Thanks for your reply! I have read similar other reports on this forum - being so new to this game I don't really know how the dough will behave in any given circumstances (other than the perfect scenarios in the Forkish book).